I was just about to come on here & tell you all about my first day of teaching & plan some more lessons for this week... and then I had a technology panic attack and cursed myself for purchasing a mac that come without a manual 'eject' button on it. I was going to try out one of the CDRom's that came with the English package, when it got stuck! Definitely not formatted for my computer, as my computer wouldn't even read that there was something in it. With a mac you can't just press eject on the computer & out it comes. Anyways... long story short, I just spent the last 2 hours searching my computer's help menu & the apple website trying all the many ways to get this thing out!! (most of which using terminology that I will never understand, thank goodness they make attempts to somewhat dumb it down for techno-illiterate people like me). Result - I got it out!!! YEAH!
Today was our first official day teaching, and I planned as though the teachers were giving me the full reigns. Thank goodness I did this because that is exactly what they did. It was fantastic! My partner teacher (Miss Woo) & another support/translator (Miss Jeung) did however stay in the classroom and helped out with everything I was doing! My first lesson was with P1 (Karate kid!!) & we were starting chapter 2 of their English textbook. When I had met with Miss Woo last week she had said that she would prefer it if for now, that I try to do the lessons exactly how she does so that the transition is easier. Because my understanding of cantonese is extremely limited and her English (it's pretty good... but I'm sure we miss a lot of what each other is trying to say), anyways I really didn't get a full understanding of what exactly she does in the classroom. So I went with what I thought was going on. Another boat that I missed during our conversations (actually both Hong & I didn't get this), but I guess Mondays & Wednesdays, they have 'oral class'. It's a complete 1/2 hour devoted to speaking. So today was Monday and although my lesson did include speaking... it wasn't a full half hour of only speaking. Unsure of how exactly I'll plan for this?? It just seems forced to remove the speaking from all of the other areas of learning English. & not to mention what the heck are we going to talk about for 1/2 an hour?? Another boat that I missed (man, I was really stuck in the middle of the ocean on this one!) was that I didn't assign the kids any homework. Miss Woo came up to me after & said - "I'm a little concerned that you didn't assign any homework"... and I was thinking to myself - I'm supposed to give them homework?? They're 5!!! I guess they receive homework in each subject every day, so I will need to start taking that into account. whoopsies! There I go again, carrying Canadian assumptions of homework etiquette into Macau. Can you imagine if we assigned homework to Grade ones in Canada? Parents would be livid!!! & not to mention it wouldn't actually get done!
I then had another lesson with the Kindergarten class (K1). These kids are about 3-4 years old. They were learning the letter P this week so I chose a song to go along with this. We sang the 'Peanut butter & jelly' song with actions that I made up & then played 'pass the peanut butter' with a jar of PB that I brought from home. I think they were a little disappointed at the end of the game when they didn't get to eat it! Anyways, they had a lot of fun & were super cute. Any suggestions of any P-letter, pig, pizza, or peanut butter related games that I can do with them on Wednesday??? Oh boy! This should be interesting.
Now that I've procrastinated the day away, I'm going to get to work!
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