Drea's moments :): Thailand--The teaching

Teaching in Thailand was super fun! Before left we were told to plan and bring everything that we needed to teach 8 classes. They had assigned us one person that we were going to teach with for that whole week. So before we had left the house Aaron and I had made sure that we had all the flashcards, all the worksheets, all the markers, and everything else you could possibly need to teach 8 classes of English to 60 kids in one week.

We arrived and they told us that instead of teaching 4 days with 2 classes a day we were going to teach days with 2 classes a day. Also, some people would have the same kids all week but other people were going to have multiple classes. Thankfully mine and Aaron’s teaching wasn’t too confusing. Monday, Wednesday and Friday we had 5^th graders and Tuesday and Thursday we had 7^th graders.

When we got there all of the kids didn't have English names so we got to give most of the kids English names. It was really fun because I got to name a lot of boys. I pretty much gave them all my brothers names. Now all my brothers have name sakes in Asia :)

<This little cutie is DJ :) He loved to write his name too. He wrote it on everything!

<This kid decided to name himself

<This kid thought this was an appropriate name

The 5^th graders were so fun to teach! We taught them animals which included, Old MacDonald had a farm. We taught them about fruit, emotions, family, seasons, and a couple other things. They were so fun because they thought we were so cool and the awesomest people ever.

The 7^th graders on the other hand were kind of frustrating. They didn’t really like anything we had planned and just sat there and didn’t give feedback. Well, until we introduced them to a team game where they all had to play so their team would win. We taught the kids about opposites, I think I might have liked that class the best. It was our last class with our 7^th graders and they hadn’t liked anything that we had done so far and then we told them about this game. They all went crazy! It was hard to keep them from not cheating. But they loved it then we had to say goodbye, not knowing we would see them again.

Friday morning we found out that they also wanted us to teach on Saturday, all morning. Guess who we got to teach, the 7^th graders! 4 classes straight of 7^th grade goodness, on a Saturday morning where if they were normally kids they’d be sleeping and complaining the whole time.

We were kind of scared about it because they seemed to not like us very much and not like the things that we had planned. I prayed about it and Aaron and I lessoned planned. We had enough lesson plans to teach them because we had only taught them 4 times before which meant we had our other 4 lesson plans that we could teach them. OR we could do something completely different, we could watch a movie.

So for our first class we showed them the beginning of Over the Hedge, we didn’t really see any reaction and it was really early in the morning so the next period we went a different direction. We played games, games where they would be in teams and all of them had to participate. Third period we had Lucas come in and teach. Lucas is a legit English teacher in Kinmen, he has his own classes and everything. He had his kids write letters to the kids in Thailand and he wanted the Thai kids to write back. So for third period the kids wrote letters back to the Taiwanese kids.

Fourth period. Best class ever. As a reward for the kids Lucas gave them all silly bands in the shapes of letters. They loved them so much and started to write words with them. That went in a good direction, we started talking to them and helping them spell English words, they really liked that and it helped us get them to like us. Then I stole one of the kids sunglasses, and someone else’s hat, and someone’s jacket, I put them on and Aaron beat boxed for them. The boys thought that was really really cool and they challenged Aaron to a beat boxing competition. Aaron beat boxed and one of the boys danced.

We did that for a long time then we took them into another room and taught them the Waka Waka. By the time we were done with the Waka Waka class wasn’t over yet so we took them back to the room and watched some Pixar Shorts with them. They thought they were really funny; we didn’t want to keep them from liking us so on accident we kept them 10 minutes after class was over. We had a good class and by the end the kids loved us and didn’t want us to leave.

One of the classes we taught was on family and about our families. We had them draw pictures of their families and we showed them pictures of ours.

Aaron's family....