waterbaby
Joined: 01 Feb 2003
Location: Baking Gord a Cheescake pie
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 Posted: Sun Feb 01, 2004 3:51 pm Post subject: Re: Kindy teachers READ THIS... 12 too many? Other questions |
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| Gollum wrote: |
| waterbaby wrote: |
| Gollum wrote: |
| How many kids do you teach in your kindy classes? |
35~40 students per class, ages (western) 3~7 |
Only you teaching?
How did you handle discipline? Sticker bribes? |
I teach at a Korean kindergarten. The students are taught in Korean, except for their 15 minute English clases with me. I teach 10 of these classes each morning, 4 times per week. They also have another 15 minutes per day with a Korean English teacher.
Most of the time I have a Korean teacher to help me out with settling the kids down... their regular class teacher or her assistant... usually though they're busy making materials or writing text messages on their phones Quite often I'm left on my own.
Discipline isn't really a problem because the kids have been well instructed in acceptable classroom behaviour by their Korean teachers. When I come in, they're either seated at their desks or sitting on the floor in a big group. They don't get up and run around unless I tell them to. The best thing I can do to stop them misbehaving is to keep them interested & I largely do this by turning EVERYTHING into a game/activity & I do only short activities of 5 mins.
For ex, after an introduction where we practice Q&As, we have a story book we read and each week the kids are supposed to memorise two sentences (  ) so I help them first understand the sentences and then memorise them by practicing in teams... who's the loudest, who's the quietest... then we practice in the "monster" voice, the "ghost" voice, the "grandfather" voice etc.
I teach them a different song & dance each week which they love. So we sing that a few times.
Finally, I play a game for at least five minutes to practice & improve their vocab. To keep the whole class interested when only 2 kids are playing at a time, I make it a team thing & have taught different chants for cheering... I think I've become the master of 5 minute kindy games!!! For ex. I use fly swatters or giant hammers to get kids to hit the word I call out and when they know the vocab quite well, I'll hold up a flashcard for only 2 kids to see and the first to call out the correct answer wins a point. Man, I must have about 100 5 minute games in my game bank.
I sometimes give the kids stickers for winning but never for discipline/class control. They're just round dots, but they don't care, they love them. Of the only dozen or so times over the year I've been doing this that I've had to discipline students, I just get them to face the wall and stick their arms up & then when their regular Korean teacher comes in & sees them, she'll really chew them up and spit them out for me 
The younger they are, the better behaved they are. They love their English classes & are always so excited and happy to see me, but it's the korean age 7 year olds that can sometimes be a pain because they want to be little smartarses and seek attention from their classmates for generally being little s***heads. I only have about 3 classes where that happens... not often, just sometimes.
So I think the first thing the kids need to learn before they start learning their ABCs is to learn how to behave in the classroom, what's acceptable behaviour & how to respond to things like sit down, stand up, be quiet, put your pencils down, take out your books, put your books away. Knowing a bit of Korean really helps too.
I'm lucky in that this has already been done for me (though not in English!). If you're teaching kids that are entering a classroom for the first time, then they need to learn how to behave in that classroom before you effectively teach them anything. This would take between 2 weeks to over a month, depending on how often you teach them.
Once the kids learn what's acceptable behaviour & if you mix it up a bit & keep them doing only short activities, I think you could teach 30+ students with little problem. |
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crazylemongirl
Joined: 23 Mar 2003
Location: almost there...
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| Posted: Sun Feb 01, 2004 8:17 pm Post subject: |
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I have taught kindy classes between 8 and 30. At the moment I am teaching one class of 8 and four classes of 20+. The level of support between the classes is different.
The 30 kid class, was crazy as I was a new teacher and got no support. I would often have a coloring activity and move around the class teaching the kids the lesson material in smaller groups.
The good korean teachers have the kids well trained in what's acceptable in the classroom, which makes classroom management a lot easier.
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