Monday

Woke up at 7:15am, had rice for breakfast, then drove to school. A super relaxed day at work today with only three lessons, since one lesson was rescheduled to tomorrow. I had first period free and there wasn’t much prep to do so I just did whatever to try and fill up my time. I taped together the Pin the nose on Olaf game and made lots of carrot stencils so that kept me busy for a little while. Also cleaned up my files (there were a lot of handouts/old schedules/newsletters that I could throw out) and applied for annual leave for the winter break!

3-2 in period 2 and we did the final lesson of the country’s flags. In this lesson the kids drew their own flags, and although they were meant to use the shapes we learnt in class (the standard geometric shapes), a lot of other stuff started appearing – we got slime, basketball hoops, baseball fields, a skateboard park, a castle, and even a dragon. It was pretty hilarious. So since that didn’t really work, I got them to present their flags by just saying what colours they used in English. I had wanted them to present shapes as well but with the many different shapes that appeared, I decided to skip that. One kid had even drawn his flag before the lesson in advance, and his flag had special meanings for each shape and symbol, which was very cute. Spent the spare period 3 printing and cutting out the carrots for the Olaf game. 3-1 in period 4 and we did the same thing as 3-2. I had wanted to try out this game where the kids would draw each others’ flag based on the instructions they receive from their partner (“one blue triangle” “two red circles” etc.) but as expected the kids here are perfectionists to the core so just drawing the flag took a long time. I got a few kids to present their flags at the end though so there was still a little bit of English in there.

Lunchtime today was super fun because I was eating with the special needs class, and since there’s only 3 kids (plus 3 teachers supervising) we all sat around a table and the chair was like a comfy sofa bench so that was cute. The atmosphere was really family-like, and they were talking about Christmas presents and stuff. The kids were super cute and one of the girls kept shouting out random sea creatures when we asked her what she wanted for Christmas so that was pretty hilarious. Spent the lunch break outside today playing with the kids – some 1st graders started jump rope but failed cause they’re still so little and a bit uncoordinated, so then we moved onto playing tag until the bell rang. Cleaning time was smooth, albeit a bit noisy since it was the noisy girl rostered on this week. 5-1 in period 5 today and we got them to make their own word finds and then exchange and do each others’ finished word finds. Only like 3 kids managed to finish making their wordfinds though, so we saved doing the wordfinds till next lesson and asked those who hadn’t finished to finish making their wordfinds for homework. Spent period 6 cutting out more carrots for the Olaf game – it’s such a good way to pass time. I printed out too many carrots but it doesn't hurt to have spares and extras so I’m just slowly cutting my way through. Got off work at 16:20 and drove home. Had kimchi udon for dinner.