Kinder

I love teaching.  I don't even know why.  Really, why??!!!?  I'm so confused!  How can I possibly love it this much?!

First of all, Elementary.  You all know that I teach Elementary because I've told you like seven times and I've introduced you to all my students at least once or twice.  I love elementary with all my heart.  The kids are SO funny!  They are so cute and so smart and they freaking rock at English.  We get to learn real grammar which I love and play actual games and tell actual stories and we all understand each other because we are all speaking English.  Plus they say the funniest things.

I know I always tell you what Rico says, but that's just because he is always cracking me up, so here is what he said last week.  Someone stole his pencil or something so he started shouting, "Robber!  Robber!  Robber with... a R.... big!"  You know, like capital R.  Haaaaa.  Also, like a month ago I taught them about slang words and I told them that sometimes kids use the word "sick" to mean cool.  Rico has really taken that to heart and just yesterday he came and sat on my lap and said, "Teacher, you are very sick."  I about died of laughter.  And his accent makes it even ten times funnier.

Anyway, I love them and I always have a fabulous time with them.  But then it turned to the Summer session as I told you in a previous post.  Let me tell you what exactly that means.  First of all, it doesn't affect the evening session.  The morning, however, is totally different.  We now teach every other morning from 10 to 12 and it's mostly kids who weren't taking ILP earlier in the semester.  Some of them know a lot of English and some of them know nothing.

So before it all started, we really didn't know what to expect.  We didn't know who would show up, how much English they would know, how old they would be, nothing.  So we told Kelly what we would prefer to teach, if possible.  As you could probably guess, I told her I prefer Elementary.  Because they are so fun!  And I didn't want to have to learn how to teach something else and I thought it would be hard when they don't speak English and blah blah blah.  We all have our reasons, but whatev.

In the end, I was assigned to Kinder.  A.k.a. the kids who stare at you when you ask them their name.  A.k.a. the kids who only say, "Blue" when you say, "What is this?"

So I was nervous.  I didn't know what I was doing, I didn't know how to plan my lessons, I didn't know what to ask the kids, I could hardly remember their names after I forced it out of them.  Last week was week one of all this and it was crazy.  We didn't know how to separate the kids, we didn't even know how to separate the teachers, we just didn't know what was going on, but we had to pretend like we did, because all these kids were showing up everyday to learn English.  So we took that week to get everything figured out, and then this week came.  Week two.  And guess what.

I LOVE KINDER!  I seriously can't get over how fun they are!  I didn't teach on Monday or Tuesday morning, so yesterday was my first time, and oh my gosh.  When those two hours were up, I could not stop smiling.  I kept talking and talking to Kira and Timber about how awesome it was and how much I loved it to death and I honestly had this permanent smile on my face.  I couldn't wait to come back the next day (today) to teach them again.

And guess what.  This morning?  Just as fun!  The little Kinder kids are just adorable because they are so little and they have these big eyes and they think everything you do is amazing and if you act really excited, they will be really excited, so it's just a big ball of excitement and learning and it is sooooo fun.  But if you think the little Kinder kids are fun, try the older ones.  They are my favorite.  They are like 10 and 11 years old (same as my Elementary students), but they don't speak any English.  They try so hard and they have such good attitudes and they are so fun.  It's weird because I feel like I can still talk to them like they are older, even though they don't really know English, you know?  So they are like Elementary in their matureness, which I love, but they don't know any English, so they are fascinated by everything we do and they smile all the time and I love love love it.

And another thing absolutely fascinating about teaching Kinder is that you can totally see their progress. Last week when they came and didn't know anything, we would say to them, "Who wants a pencil?"  And they would stare at us.  So we taught them to say, "I want a pencil!"  And after a couple days we would say, "Who wants a crayon?"  And they would say, "Who wants a crayon?"  So we taught them again to say, "I want a crayon!"  And today, I said, "Who wants to feel it?"  And I didn't even have to tell them, they just said, "I want to feel it!"  It's crazy!  This program totally works.

So after two hours of ridiculously fun English learning, they all file out of your classroom with their arms folded, smiling, and saying, "Bye, Teacher!"

If this is not Heaven, I don't know what is.