Filed under: ESL, IGR Recommends, U S of A, food, games, lesson plans, skool, teaching | Tags: ESL, Kentucky, Korean rock, lesson plans, Lexington, Shin Jung Hyeon, worksheets
2. Would You Rather lesson plan (note: this has been quite successful)
5. Scenes from a Restaurant lesson (also v. successful, but don’t bother giving your students food unless they are not ungrateful little hoodlums like mine)
6. Scenes from a Restaurant ppt
7. Scenes from a Restaurant video (feat. Grover as a waiter with a giant hamburger; hilarity ensues)
And since I’m mentioning the Restaurant lesson and the lessons in general, allow me to make a couple of points:
a) I used the menus from Ramsey’s, which is a fine establishment that you should make it a point to visit should you ever find yourself in Lexington, KY. I’ve only ever been to the one on High Street, but I can wholeheartedly recommend their Hot Brown and anything involving white gravy, as well as the pie, which is not on there but is worth making a trip for on its own. I prefer the mixed berry, but one of the Good Brown Daughters (with whom I usually go) says that there’s nothing but the brownie pie for her. Also, these menus are good for ESL classes, as they have a lot of food that students will imagine as stereotypically “American” while including some regional stuff. Also, fairly simple.
b) If you use these lessons and I don’t know you, please do leave me a comment telling me how you liked them. I’ve been bad about responding in the past, partly because I’m still foggy on a few of WordPress’s technicalities (for example, will you be notified if I respond?) but I really do like hearing from people who use these. I will start responding to comments. I promise.
Syllables:
Here’s the previously discussed syllables lesson.
And here’s the PowerPoint (not mine), the worksheet and its key.
Compliments:
The YouTube video (in case the ppt embed doesn’t work)
This lesson is popular beyond all reason. For smarter kids, maybe add an insult lesson, because they’ll be insulting each other anyway.
Here, for your teaching pleasure:
Lesson 3 – The Price is Right! (lesson plan)
Lesson 3 – The Price is Right! (PowerPoint)
Lesson 4 – I Wish (all, incl. song)
Now in the archives as well. Enjoy.
Filed under: IGR Recommends, lesson plans, poetry, skool, students, teaching
Twice in ten minutes, if anyone’s counting.
2-4 - I Wish…
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Famous American: Nina Simone
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I could feel them dragging…this is such a confusing concept
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liked song
1-6 - The Price is Right
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well-behaved
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responsive to numbers (but didn’t know million)
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took threat of point subtraction seriously (GOOD)
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WotD: discount
2-2 – I Wish
- Famous American: Nina Simone
- started class with genie scenario, kids were receptive
- more “I Wish” examples necessary to fill time
- ended up doing rhymes to finish class
2-3 – I Wish
- Co-Teacher E thinks they need more time to practice
- covered “I wish I could” and change of subjects (i.e. “I wish she could”)
- Famous American: Nina Simone
- find picture of Nina Simone that students will not compare to: giraffe, monkey, me
I’m beginning to realize that I should have paid more attention in fifth grade. My knowledge of grammar is roughly comparable to the Supreme Court’s knowledge of pornography: I can’t define it, but I know it when I see it. Teaching the subjunctive is really hard. On an unrelated note, I tried to take a shower and discovered that the tub is covered in a fine matting of hair. I have come up with a number of explanations for this scenario, and none of them hold up. Maybe I’ll go to the jjimjilbang tomorrow instead.
Reading The Omnivore’s Dilemma makes me want to be a farmer, which is a bad idea for so many reasons I don’t have time to list them all here. Less self-destructively, it also makes me want to learn more about Wendell Berry, who comes from my state, or one of my states, at least. I regret that I didn’t learn more about him when I was there – I have friends who have recommended him to me before, but I was not fully appreciative of Kentucky at the time. Well. Now I am.
In A Motel Parking Lot, Thinking Of Dr. Williams
Wendell Berry
<!– Wendell Berry poem –>
I. The poem is important, but not more than the people whose survival it serves, one of the necessities, so they may speak what is true, and have the patience for beauty: the weighted grainfield, the shady street, the well-laid stone and the changing tree whose branches spread above. For want of songs and stories they have dug away the soil, paved over what is left, set up their perfunctory walls in tribute to no god, for the love of no man or woman, so that the good that was here cannot be called back except by long waiting, by great sorrows remembered and to come by invoking the thunderstones of the world, and the vivid air. II. The poem is important, as the want of it proves. It is the stewardship of its own possibility, the past remembering itself in the presence of the present, the power learned and handed down to see what is present and what is not: the pavement laid down and walked over regardlessly--by exiles, here only because they are passing. Oh, remember the oaks that were here, the leaves, purple and brown, falling, the nuthatches walking headfirst down the trunks, crying "onc! onc!" in the brightness as they are doing now in the cemetery across the street where the past and the dead keep each other. To remember, to hear and remember, is to stop and walk on again to a livelier, surer measure. It is dangerous to remember the past only for its own sake, dangerous to deliver a message you did not get.
I’m currently trying to plan what appears to be the only ESL lesson in existence based on Skee-Lo’s “I Wish.” The plan is to teach my students a) the construction “I wish,” b) how to rhyme, and c) the word “baller.” I suspect, however, I’m going to end up using Nina Simone’s “I Wish I Knew How It Feels To Be Free,” which is also a good song, but one which mentions neither ballers nor Impalas.
In the meantime, I’ll try to post the Price is Right lesson soon. The election lesson needs some pretty serious modification before it can be put up.
And since I’m on the subject of Ms. Simone, I’ll go ahead and Recommend one of my favorite songs of hers:
Nina Simone – Mississippi Goddamn
You can download most of the rest of that album here. I’m not sure why I don’t have all the songs.
EDIT: I went to Mass today in short sleeves, because it was the only remotely springlike outfit I could find, and HM asked me three different times if I was going to be cold. People at church asked me if I was cold. Complete strangers came up to me, rubbed my arms, and asked me if I was cold. HM had HB call me to ask if I was cold later. When I came home, HM asked me if I was cold. And now that it is 11:11 PM and I am wearing pants and a sweatshirt, HD just came in and asked me if I was cold today. I GET IT. Isn’t there a point in your life where how cold you are becomes no one’s business but your own?
Filed under: ESL, Jeju crew, actual transcripts, host fam, lesson plans, life on Jeju, life progress
“You are beautiful girl! I am luxury guy!”
- a third-grader (read: ninth-grader) tries to seduce me in the hallway
1M (boys) – movie reviews, part 1
• WotD: cinema/quiz: fun/funny
• didn’t get to clip (mostly due to poor time org on my part)
• were they worse than average or do I just feel bad today?
• The Cutest Student Ever’s boyfriend sits in the front row, is also great
2E (girls) – movie reviews, part 1
• not particularly high-level but we got through the lesson in good time
• how can I revise this to cover all the material, make it less of me talking, and get it done in 45 minutes?
• realization: I have been wearing my skirt backwards for the past three hours
One would think that, being suddenly forced to find a new future, going back to bed would not be the ideal course. And it’s not. But aside from the fact that TFANY is gone, I do have a small but nasty cold, and I did have three hours this afternoon that I was supposed to use to go suit shopping with Scooter. I bailed, feeling congested and exhausted, although the truth is that I felt worse for myself than I did skipping out on him.
So this afternoon, instead of doing something productive, I dreamed that I was working at Starbucks. It was exactly like working at Hollister. One of the girls I used to work with was even there, and, in a side plot, was also volunteering with the Fresh Air Fund. I got made some sort of manager within, I don’t know, three days, but no one would tell me how to do anything, so I just hung out in the back all day. I was a manager and I didn’t even know how to work the machines. I’m pretty sure that’s a metaphor for the fact that I’m afraid of being a fraud, of taking on responsibility that I’ve convinced people I’m equipped to handle without actually being qualified. Or it might be a commentary on how many times a week I go to Hollys and Tom and Toms. Tossup, really.
But – in the spirit of celebrating small victories – I slept this afternoon because I was sick, not because I was sad. Unlike the marathon, escapist sleeping sessions of days of yore, I slept today not because I didn’t want to deal with the stress of being awake, but because my head felt like a balloon filled with aerated mucus. Which is unpleasant, but the lesser of two evils, for sure.
I’ve been browsing jobs on idealist.org but, dishearteningly, have no experience with dairy cows or Swahili, which means that a lot of opportunities are out. Hallim’s coming in to town tonight and host fam is taking us out to dinner and to the jjimjilbang, where we can talk about this situation and help me find some method of living productively as we sit in the scented tubs and get pointed at. Congested or not, it’s still a good life.
Filed under: PCT, classes, lesson plans, life on Jeju, skool, students, teaching
Sample titles for more personal ads today:
“I am so lonely”
“You will be my boyfriend”
“Do you want a girl?”
1C (girls) personal ad (part 1)
- unresponsive but not bad
- quiz: what holiday was last week?
- WotD: “ideal”
- next week: finish PAs
1A (girls) personal ad (part 2)
- quiz: describe your ideal boyfriend
- no WotD
- reviewed adjectives
- practiced titles
- each girl made ad, some read
- more high-level girls
1D (girls) personal ads (part 2)
- see 1C (same work)
- significant progress: Field Trip*, Orphanage**
- now volunteering ^^
- Canada brilliant***
2D (girls) movie reviews (part 1)
- mixed now (thanks)
- made up lesson as I went along
- discussed: why do we like movies?
- got about 20 minutes into “You’ve Got Mail”
1B (girls) personal ads (part 1)
- usually Tuesdays, got switched bc of conference
- Eun Jeong and Mi Yeon came to class EARLY so I gave them the sarang hand sign (hands in the shape of a heart)
- overall pretty good
It appears that all my second grade (read: eighth grade) classes are combined until the end of the year, which is a good thing in that it will allow the low-level students to work with the high-level students and stop them from being paralyzed by these ridiculously low expectations, and bad in that I JUST HAD LOW LEVEL STUDENTS and they made me want to pull out my hair piece by piece. Also, I had no lesson plan for a combined class; in addition to the fact that the high-level lesson I had ready was way too hard (um, making a new Mayflower Compact?), the low-level girls did Thanksgiving last week. Naturally, PCT didn’t tell me about all this until, oh, today, which meant that I had to make something up. I was going to let them watch a movie, out of spite, but I caved at the last minute and sort of improvised a movie-review lesson. I should have stuck to my vengeful guns, but fortunately for PCT, my nagging neuroses that I am actually a very bad and lazy teacher made me turn it into a Real Lesson. (Note: PCT also failed to tell me that I had an extra class today due to the workshop I’m attending tomorrow. DOES she do this on purpose?)
Anyway I made it to the post office but not in time to meet Soccer; we were supposed to meet to start writing a grant addressed to the Program, requesting money for the after-school program, but then I fell asleep on the bus (note: I also slept through my alarm this morning) and ended up near Soccer’s school, but several bus stops past Soccer herself, who was getting up to leave Holly’s just as I was arriving. The PO, of course, took forever, and I was not inclined to think favorably of Korea, but then, as always, I found myself across the table from Soccer and then later Scooter, eating doughnut holes and giggling. I hope that when I come back my friends are somewhere near as good as the ones I have here.
Africa came with me to yoga, where the teacher gave us a bag of kiwis for no reason – she always seems to have boxes of produce around – and then we went to a dive and ate, and I came home and talked to Oma. There’s this Tupperware of these Korean snacks next to me – the snacks are like Smacks, stuck into bars – and I swear I can hear them snapping, crackling, and popping. I may not have people here bending over backwards to tell me I’m beautiful, or even to behave in my class, but I think I get enough gifts.
*Field Trip: I was paired with her on the school picnic, after which she started talking to me (v. shy)
**Orphanage: I met her at the orphanage – at first in class wouldn’t/couldn’t even write name
***Canada: just got back from studying in Canada
TODAY’S THING I LIKE: this list. I sent it out to the J-crew a while ago, but then I forgot about it until one of the Program kids forwarded it today. Nothing describes my life better.
