Work and Play

Hello World :)

It’s been a while since I last posted and being the weekend, I figured it was a good time to catch you all up! Since you last heard from me, I have been snowboarding with lots of good friends, had a lazy Valentine’s weekend and am now spending time on myself. This also includes a few weeks of work and I’m REALLY excited to share with you all a fun activity I played with both Kindergarten classes this past Thursday and Friday!

Let’s start at the beginning. A few weekends ago, a HUGE group of us headed to Muju yet again. This time we had the regulars along with a few new people. Kate came along, as well as a girl from the other Gwangyang (Gwangyang Eup) and we also met up with Andy and his sweet girlfriend Gyuna. Saturday morning TK, Mina and Renee drove up too but most of us didn’t even see them!
After a pretty quite Friday night, the guys headed out before the sun was up while the rest of us snoozed until about 7:30. We all got ready and headed right outside of our building to the slope (we had a suite in the same building and the trip before).

Christine, Pete and Lizzie ready to head outside!

Christine and Lizzie took off after a few minutes while Pete and I tried to teach Kate how to snowboard. We know we are not the best teacher for this, especially when we only comfortably know the basics ourselves, but we did what we could. I told Kate all of the tips I could remember Dan giving me my first time out a month earlier. She did pretty well with standing up on our own, but she had a lot less balance than I did and as soon as she’d stand up, she would start speeding down sideways instead of working on heel side and “penduluming” down. I wish she had a better time with it, because even with all of the padding, she fell and hurt a lot.

Pete trying to help Kate; at this point I was just laughing.. :)

 Lizzie and Christine met back up with us and we all made it to the ski lift together. Kate loved that. When we got back to the top, we started out together and this time Pete and Christine were the first to leave the group. After a while, Lizzie and I left too. While waiting for the ski lift, we saw Dan and Seth in line ahead of us. They waited for us at the top and then took off in search of Kate. When they met up with her, she was ready to be done for the day so we headed in for a bit and then went to eat. After that, some of us headed out again. I went on the hard courses and I was pretty convinced Dan was trying to kill me because they were all sooo icy AND windy! I managed to stay standing for most of it, but I did fall a lot more, like when I first learned! Still, I wasn’t too discouraged and there were some parts with small slopes where I could fall down and then just slide down on my butt, keeping my legs and board off the ground a bit. That was SO MUCH FUN!! :D

Dan and I on a ski lift to the "hard" courses

 don’t know if that’s my last time going this season or not. As I write this, Dan, Seth, Rob and Yonodan are in Yeongpyong and probably having way more fun than where there’s a whole mess of us. :)

When we got back from that trip, it was Super bowl Sunday and Dan had the next day off! I think it’s hilarious that they give the guys the Monday after off but it makes sense because they wouldn’t be able to watch it live otherwise and I guess a lot of guys like to watch football… at least that’s what I’ve heard. :)

The rest of the week was like any other work week and Dan came down that Friday as always. We were planning on going out that night. I even met Dan for dinner but then we came back to my place to drop off his bag and we just never left! We got caught up on all of the shows we like to watch together and watched some movies too. It was a great way to spend the weekend. I didn’t leave once. Lazy, shmazy, that’s how I like it!

Dan and I FEASTED on these babies!! 6 each.. of yeah! :D haha

Now on to this week.

I’ve been doing a lot of self reflection recently and really looking at the person, and more specifically, the teacher I’ve become since moving overseas. I knew when I first got out here that it was going to be MUCH different from teaching in the States, but I have been trying to find ways to teach my students with the best practice methods I was taught in college. This can be challenging when I am required to use and complete students books and coursework in a set number of days, or months. Still, I do what I can to make fun, engaging lessons that also teach the kids English.

This week, I was able to do that in my Kindergarten classes on Thursday and Friday. Earlier this week, I got the kids talking about rhyming words. I asked them if they knew what that word meant and we made a chart, just like the ones we use each week with their Student Book vocabulary words, like the one featured here:

From last April. vocabulary word 3 times with a picutre representing the word.
Now they write a few sentences instead of pictures. Progress! :)

After they each had their eight boxes drawn, I had them write down an ending starting with the simple ones, like –at, -in, and –it. Then I would ask each student for a word with that ending and we would all write it down on our charts. We did this with 8 different rhyme endings, making the endings a bit more difficult, like –eed and –ead, and so forth. This got a bit frustrating for both me and the students because they had a hard time differentiating between the vowel sounds. They would say a word thinking it had the ending we were working on but then I would say, “Well, that word is spelled like this. It has a different ending,” or something to that affect.

Then Thursday morning, before I went into school, I thought of playing a rhyming game with the kids where they would look through papers on the ground with several rhyming words and try to find all the words with the same ending. To do this, I’d have the kids all pick up one word, say it, and tell me the ending that word had. Then I’d write it on the board next their name and make sure each child was looking for words with a different ending. Then I’d count to 3 and say “go!” and the kids would race around the room making sure they flipped over each piece of paper and found all of the words in their word family. Once they thought they had found all of the words, they came back to their seats. When everyone was finished, they each took turns reading the words off of the paper and I’d record it on the board. Then they’d do it again!

All of the 6 year olds, Michael, Amanda, Alan and Joseph looking for their words

The chart I made with the words they found. At the bottom they had to count
the words from each ending and then add them up, that's cross-curricular! :)

They had SOOO much fun with it and I managed to get these pictures Friday morning when I played with each class. I added new words and word endings to keep it fresh and to encourage more learning. All in all, a great end to my work week!

Sarah, Edward, and Sherly

Sherly

Sarah

Sally

Edward, Eric and Sally

7 year old word chart

 Dan has a big exercise starting next week, so he had a short, but very busy, work week. This meant he was down here on Thursday instead! I always love having him here. We spent the night cooking dinner for the Davey’s and ourselves. We ate at their place and watched the movie Moneyball. In case you aren’t familiar with the film, it’s about a baseball team that has a very small budget compared to other major league teams and after they lose their better players to said teams, they have to try and rebuild the team. It is not my typical kind of movie, and even with Brad Pitt and Jonah Hill starring in it, I wasn’t very interested in it. Although, Lizzie and I kept chatting and giggling, annoying the boys who just kept turning up the volume. It was so loud! haha

After I finished work on Friday, I came home to Daniel cooking me some VERY yummy pasta with chicken. We relaxed until Rob came by to take the boys away for the weekend. With the free time, I’ve been catching up on my shows and being lazy and productive!

Well, that’s all for now! Until next time, have happy days! :)