Newsflash: Teaching Assignments!

***** I am officially teaching third grade English and music! *****

Our new teachers finally arrived yesterday! And with their arrival, decisions could finally be made about who should teach what. Sadly, however, the local English teacher has been reassigned to a nearby school. So while I'll be teaching third grade, my Chinese cofellow 文欢 (Wenhuan) will teach fourth grade, and Katherine will teach fifth and sixth grade.

There are four third-grade classes and they meet twice-a-week each for English and music. That means I'll be teaching each class four times a week for a total of 16 class periods per week. All of my classes also have only about 40 students! This is really exciting. Between that and the fact that I'll be teaching the same kids for both subjects, this means that I should be able to remember all their names! At least the English ones I give them--I'm still not very good at remember Chinese names. But hopefully I'll get better, especially since some of the students may not have English names for awhile since I'm planning on using these names as an incentive for good behavior. I should have 160 or so students in total which is totally manageable! Some fellows have three or four times as many if they only teach each class once a week.

Today I reviewed colours with a third grade class that I was asked to cover. I had just taught them red, blue, yellow, green, pink, and white on Tuesday so we reviewed these, and learned orange and purple. Then we learned the first two lines of the Disney spectrum song: "Red, yellow, green, red, blue, blue, blue/ Red, purple, green, yellow, orange, red, red." Although the song was hard for them in some ways they thought it was funny and it definitely helped some of them say some of the colours. There was one lonely voice who had the whole thing down pat while the rest struggled.

Then I pulled out a calendar with fancy flowers on it and we named the colours of the flowers. I thought this would be good practice, but I didn't expect them to be so enthralled by the flower themselves. Some combination of the fact that I told them they were "American" flowers and the fact that they were extremely decorative specimens truly impressed them. There was oohing and ahhing.