Crayon Club Children's English

Crayon Club Children's English

If you'll remember from an earlier post, I found a job teaching English to kids. Well, the semester has ended and my last class was today. I'm glad I took the job for my own experience, but I can't say I'm sorry that I won't be teaching anymore.

Here we're playing a game called Big Wind Blow. It's similar to musical chairs. There is one less chair than there are students. Who ever doesn't have a chair says "Big wind blows." The sitting students reply, "Big wind blows whom?" Then the standing student names an attribute like "People wearing a dress." Then the students with dresses jump up and run around until I say sit down and the whole thing starts again.

This is Ming Ming. He's probably the best student. He pays attention well and pronounces words very well. I have no doubt that he will be fluent in English.

Flash card time.

From left to right: Hao Hao, Susan, Bao Bei, Ming Ming, Yun Yun, and Du Du.




Spelling time. I didn't get to choose the words they learned how to spell, but I tried my best to introduce basic phonics to the kids. What I did succeed in was teaching them the difference between 1 bed and 2 beds (as well as pluralizing other nouns, although I didn't introduce words like dresses, I didn't want to confuse them). In Chinese, nouns are not pluralized, so many Chinese mess up and say 2 bed, 3 bed. I taught the kids how to write bed and then would ask them to spell beds, and they could without me writing it for them. (I would just exaggerate the s a lot and they caught on.)

This is Hao Hao. He wasn't actually in my class, but came to a few classes to make up for ones he'd missed. He was somewhat behind the other students, but tried extra hard to make up for it.

The last class was also a demonstration for the parents to show them how much their kids had learned and also to convince them to enroll their kids again. Basically my boss asked me to show off. One set of vocabulary for the kids was star, moon, earth, and sun. With these words I taught them the question/answer exercise "Where do you want to go?" "I want to go to the sun/moon/star/earth." I would have one student ask another so that they were doing most of the speaking. It was great and I think it scored huge points with the parents.

Another game the kids did well was with clothing. I had one kid tell another, "Put on the (color of item) hat/dress/t-shirt/jacket etc." I brought in my own clothes and the kid would run and put it on. Then I'd have the first student tell the other to, "Take of the ..." and then the student who had put on the clothes became the speaker and chose another student. The kids really liked this game because they got to play dress-up with my clothes. Every time a girl put something on I had the whole class say, "very pretty" and when a boy put something on I had them say, "very handsome."

This is Helen. She was the most joyful student in the class. I don't think she ever stopped smiling and always looked like she was up to some kind of innocent mischief.

This is Susan. She was the most shy of all the students, but she tried her best and usually had the right answer to all the questions. She'd often surprise me by knowing the answer when no one else did.

"Ming Ming, put on the blue jacket."

This is Yun Yun. I would sometimes give commands like "everyone repeat after me" first in English and then again in Chinese so the kids knew what I wanted them to do. Unfortunately this convinced them that I was fluent in Chinese. Which is not true. (yet). During break time Yun Yun would come up to me and say, "Kirsten, Kirsten, . . . jegjtugedjhrb,smhgjsdg" really really fast.

Normally Yun Yun catches on to new exercises quickly, but on the last day I asked her a question she didn't know how to answer and she started crying in front of all the parents! That was the first and only time any of the students cried.

This is Du Du. I would often mistake Du Du with Yun Yun, which of course mortally offended both girls for about 5 seconds. Du Du was one of the best behaved kids in the class and very clever.

Helen again.

For the most part, all the kids were really well behaved and eager to participate in class. They are smart little squirts who are all destined to do well in school.



Now meet Bao Bei, a.k.a. Monster Child


Most of the time Bao Bei wouldn't participate in exercises and instead would try to annoy the other kids. When he did, he would purposely say the wrong answer. To teach pretty and ugly, we had two dolls, one normal (pretty) and the other with marker all over her face (ugly). Whenever I showed the pretty doll, all the students would shout, "pretty girl" . . . except Bao Bei who would shout, "UGLY GIRL!" He'd often run to the door trying to exit the classroom . . . or lock the door, especially if my teaching aid wasn't in the room. On the last day of class, he hid under a table and wouldn't come out. All of the students started shouting, "Bao Bei, chu lai! Bao Bei, chu lai!" I told them instead to say, "Bao Bei, come out." That way they'd at least be practicing English. Dutifully they all started shouting, "Bao Bei, come out! Bao Bei, come out!" I was so proud.