Korean Job Discussion Forums

[mind_body_and_seoul]

Hey y'all!

I hope I am posting this on the right board!

My last 2 classes of the day are "Level 5" and "Level 6." My Level 5 students are 2 girls, aged 9 and 12. That's it. And my Level 6 student is a 10 year-old girl. The 9 year-old in Level 5 is very good at speaking English (compared to all the other kids in the school anyway!) because she went to an English school in Malaysia for a year. Her writing is not that great, but I'm not supposed to teach writing (the Korean teachers are supposed to do that), I'm supposed to teach them speaking. The girl in Level 6 is VERY smart, so she has learnt SO MUCH English in the last year, which is why she is the best in the school now. Her English is great, but she is REALLY QUIET, and she is also very bored, being the only student in the class and not having other students to compete with (she likes being the best but what's the point if you can't prove it?). The 12 year-old girl is not as good at English as the 9 year-old and I am trying to get her to be more confident and have a more positive attitude towards learning English. Right now she keeps saying, "Teacher, I can't English!" and thinks that she will never be as good as the girl who went to Malaysia. She's also just moved up to Level 5 and all her friends are still in the Level 4 class, where there are a lot more students, and where she used to be the best in the class. So now that she's in Level 5 she misses her friends and is bored, as well as thinking that Level 5 is hard and that she's not good at English. I keep telling her that she is good at English and she just needs to keep trying. She is such a sweetie, so I really hope I can help her improve.

So anyway, I was wondering if anyone was in a similar situation, just having 1 or 2 students in their classes, and if anyone has any ideas on what I can do to help make my classes more fun? I'm only supposed to be teaching them speaking, so I need activities that focus on speaking, but other types of activities won't hurt every once in a while.

If you have any ideas, please reply!

[some waygug-in]

You could try a game called "Guess Who".

I don't know if you want to go out and buy a game, but kids seem to like it. They have to describe various features of faces as they try to guess their opponents card.

Does your person have a beard?

Does your person wear glasses?

Etc.

I don't know if your students are too advanced for this, but my guess is that they will like it anyway.

I hope this helps.

[agraham]

I'm looking for ideas on this too. This week I will have my first class with a sole girl who is too advanced for the advanced class. She spent a year in New Zealand. She must be a genius or something becuase she's practically a native speaker even tho she claims she mostly hung with Ks in NZ.
This one is 14, so older than yours, OP. I guess I'll have to learn a bit about boy bands, Maple Story and cell phones. What else are 14 year old girls into?
See if you can find some pictures of "talent" that your kids are into. I find it's easier to get them talking if they have a picture to keep them focused.
I wish I had a color printer here.

[guangho]

I think "Seven" is a boy band. I learned it from the K teacher after being told I'm facing sullen 14 year old gals. Oh and Harry Potter is big too.

[Yu_Bum_suk]

Bring something new to class every day; make word lists and have them make up their own sentences; play games like hangman and scrabble. If you can just capture their curiousity it should be a breeze.

[Eunoia]

It's a long process, especially in a class such as you described with students of varying abilities. Start with basic vocabulary. Pick a theme, like Animals. Fur, feathers, claws, paws, fangs, legs, wings, spots, stripes, trunk, tusks... ocean, desert, forest, jungle, rain forest... swim, climb, fly, crawl... etc. From there you can move into basic sentence structures, like "The monkey eats bananas." "A bird flies." "A shark swims." "A spider has 8 legs." "Tigers have stripes." How specific you want to go into the grammar depends on their individual abilites.

I suspect with the advanced student you would want her to be able to distinguish between singe / plural subjects, and use the correct verbs. With your lower-lever students, you may be happy to just to hear them use the right word order and not be too picky about the details ("Monkey eat banana.") That's your call.

A popular game I like to play is something I call "Magic Chair", also known as Taboo. Put a chair in front of the board, sit a student in it and write a word or two (e.g. pink penguin, blue banana) on the board behind the chair. The other students have to give clues about what's written on the board. This gives you a chance to reinforce sentence structures when they speak.

Another thing I like to do is silly tongue-twisters. "fifty floppy flippers", "purple pepper paper", "porcelain porpoises", "we will watch the whales". It's hard, but kids seem to like it. At least it gets them speaking. Just keep it fun and light. I find that as soon as the weaker students see that the stronger students have troubles with it, then they want to try it, too. It's that whole competition thing.

Oh, and rewards. Give 'em stickers or stamps, just for trying.

[MissCanada]

I have a few classes with only 2 or 3 students, and I found that the best way to get them interested is to bring candy. Even quiet kids love lolipops, and they'll like you a lot more if you let them eat it in class. This may not be allowed in some schools, but its worth it. It makes the class more "fun" to them, and they'll be more responsive to the teaching material you bring.

[Yu_Bum_suk]

[canukteacher]

I'm not big on using candy as a regular reward. I kept warning my co-teacher last term about giving candy all the time. By the end of the term alot of the kids simply refused to participate unless there was a candy at the end. This term we are using stickers, and the candy is only given on very rare occassions.

How about finding a book at their level. They can read, learn new vocab, and answer questions about it. Having to answer questions about the story gets them thinking critically (a skill most Korean students lack).

I am using "Morris Goes to School" with a class right now. They love it. We read the book together outloud, then they take turns reading, and then they answer questions that I give them. They have to write the answers, and give them verbally. Some of the kids in this class are at a low level, so they find it difficult. However, we go slowly, and they are getting it. Morris the Moose is becoming their best friend!

Good Luck!

CT

[Yu_Bum_suk]

I just finished a class with only two kids. They were absolute hellions to the previous teacher, and for me teaching them doesn't even feel like work, it's so pleasant. It was all a matter of somehow tapping into their natural curiosity and interests. As I type this I'm printing off a celsius-fahrenheit conversion chart because that's what they seem interested in, for some strange reason ... they're fourth-grade girls...

Unfortunatley some Korean kids seem to have no natural curiosity at all, and for these one-on-one is almost hopeless.

[thorin]

Just write your lesson plans in pink. It doesn't matter what they say, just as long as they're pink.