Summer Musical Camp Rehearsal (video)

This video is a bit post-mortem, but I thought I'd share it anyways. It's from my summer camp experience last summer and it's our first run-through of our 4 minute Peter Pan musical play.  My third graders did surprisingly good and I'm proud to have worked at that camp.

Read ... Teaching at a Musical Summer Camp in Korea( click here)

Video: English Musical Camp in Korea

So as I promised, here's the video of our performance. Apologies for the bad quality of this video.  I had a friend take it for me cause I had to be in front for my students.  Also, there's a photographer who's always in the way. Wish I could've gotten a better recording.

Directing your students from the front line

In Korea, when students perform, it's common for teachers to sit up front by the stage and motion to their kids the dance, etc... Some teachers even hold up cue boards for the songs or dialogue.  Me, I trust the students to remember. But I enjoy motioning the dance moves to them.  I think it gives them support and extra confidence to know they have a safety net.

I am sitting up front by the stage.

Giving your ESL class Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving is often likened to the Korean Chuseok

Chuseok is a day when Korean families gather to eat lots of foods specific to the holiday and visit the graves of passed relatives in memorium. For my classes, I couldn't have them do or make anything, so instead I shared this Thanksgiving powerpoint that I got off of waygook.org and modified.

 Download Powerpoint here

My presentation took about 8 minutes as I went through the vocabulary and explained some of the

Just Show Me Pictures: An Expat's Frustrations in Learning a New Language & Culture

So when I first arrived in Korea, I started an expat series on my GRRRLTRAVELER blogsite called, Just Show Me Pictures, dealing with the frustrations a newly arrived expat has with learning a new language in a foreign culture.

I actually derived the series from this ppt presentation I did for my Teacher & Adult English classes. There's no sound-- it's really a powerpoint presentation which I walk through and
elaborate on with personal stories, such as the fact I washed my hair with Korean conditioner for 2 weeks thinking it was shampoo!~ This is a very short presentation but it's definitely one of my favorites.

Here's a pdf version download (roughly 40MB) of my ppt  in the case anyone wants to use it.

Lesson Plans & Games: Teaching Jobs and Occupations

(My Father is a Pilot:   6th gr Lesson 7)

1. People Song (video) by Peter Weatherall

I play this for the first time then hand out a piece of paper to each team. I ask them to list all the

Teaching "Months of the Year" (6th gr: Lesson 4.3)

We had our open/DMOE class evaluation today.  There were two NETs with two DMOE evaluators sitting in our class. I love evaluations. Yes, they're nerve wracking and my co-teacher gets so stressed out with them... But I love them. 

I love performing.

 

Here's a summary of our lesson plan on "Months of the Year":

We played  "12 Months (are in a year) Song" youTube video as the class entered and got seated.

Then we sang "The Month Song" along with the CD-Rom disk (* this song is kind of soggy, but hey...)

 

Class activity: 3 games

 

Ball Toss- When is your birthday?

Student 1: When is your birthday? (chooses someone to toss it to & that person must answer the question)
Student 2: It's June...  When is your birthday? (chooses someone to toss it to & that person must answer

Teaching Seasons & Weather (3 great videos for Gr 6: Ln 3.2:)

If you are unable to view the video in full, you can click on the title link in order to get redirected to the video on YouTube

Weather and Clothes

Video: My First Day at a Korean Elementary School

A video of my first day at Anil Elementary School
(short & sweet- I threw it together very quickly at the last-minute...)


There was no "teaching" on my first day of school and essentially the rest of the week.
My job has been to sit in our English teacher's office room and browse through textbooks. So I volunteered to do a Learning about Introductions presentation for my classes, to escape boredom and to finally see some of my kids. Apparently, on Facebook, some others are experiencing the same sitting-around thing.  It sounds as if many co-teachers aren't prepared to have to work with us or are just as new to teaching English as we are.

I help teach 3rd-6th grade and there are 4 classes per grade, so essentially, I teach 16 classes a week. I have 3 different co-teachers I have to work with and only 2 have experience teaching English. They say flexibility is key in Korea - how their teachers are thrown different responsibilities at the last minute is an example.  I am one of those responsibilities for my main co-teacher and the English teacher without experience was really a music teacher until last year.

The English teacher's office

First Day Introductions

Hello, You're a Celebrity on the School News Channel
My school introduced me via video broadcast. Our school has a broadcast room and when they introduced me via video camera, I had to perform a short bow so that the students could see me on the computer web-cast/projection screen in their classroom. While this may seem spectacular by western standards, for Koreans, its nothing out of the ordinary. The Korean school system seems to be a little more technologically advanced in their own way; and while teachers may not all be tech-saavy, they can all teach via Powerpoint presentations. I guess you could say the Korean classroom has the tools of a typical American business.

The Welcome Lunch
Being a new inductee to the school, me and a handful of other newbie teachers and school staff were treated to a welcome lunch by our Principal and Vice Principal.  During lunch period, we walked over to a nearby restaurant. My co-teacher was um..."uninvited", which embarassed and miffed her a bit- she would have taken it as an honor; but my Principal is a soft-spoken and elderly lady who makes you smile inside and her English isn't bad either.  We spoke on the way over to the restaurant and I sat next to her. Oddly however, it was our Vice Principal who sat at the head of the table and posed a more intimidating seal to crack.  Sandwiched proudly between my Principal and V.P. on the left side of the table, it was the right hand seat of the VP which seemed to be the senior and honored seat (I'm guestimating...). The new 6th grade home room teacher who was seated there mock-declined her seat in the standard "Please, please...I'm not worthy..." Asian way. She looked sweet yet was dressed in a bit of an authoritative, manish way- a suit with a tie- and took command of certain traditional things that I would have not known, like pouring drinks, etc... She was definitely the right right-hand.

Other EFL teachers on my EPIK Daegu groups on Facebook experienced drinking soju, dinner partying and noribanging (aka going to karaoke) with their Principals and co-teachers. Not here. The air was stiff at our lunch table to the point of making me forget how to use chopsticks! There was light conversation, but only in reply to the seniors when they would speak. It was a meek, serious and quiet bunch... still, I was very grateful they weren't into getting plastered and noribanging (those were two rumored things I was actually dreading)!

My 1st day name cheat sheet (all the names which would be bad not to know)

The Challenge of Memorizing Korean names
Unlike the Western culture in which each person is called either by their first or last name; in Korea, each person essentially has 3 names- a family and a two-legged surname (or last name, first-first.. something like that). For instance:

Principal:  Choi, Jung-Hye
Vice Principal:  Jung, Yong-Suk
Main Co-Teacher:  Kim, Eun-Hyung
Co-Teacher #2: Kim, Soo-Mi
Co-Teacher #3:  Lee, Hyun-Jeong

That's a brain-full for the first day. Seeing as I'm new and obviously will have trouble remembering them all, I've been allowed to call a teacher by her first name (at least that's one down) and if a teacher is really nice and excited about my being there, then she might even give me a English name to call her by, if she has one. I've only gotten one English name and it's Angelina (I think you can figure out where that name comes from, so I'm actually going to try my hardest to remember her real name)