Entry 26: 3rd Grade

I walk into my favorite class with a smile on my face as Sam yells at me in Korean "HURRY!!! LET'S START CLASS!!!". He grabs my hand and we run down the hallway. Thank God, that I have these kids every Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday. If it was up to me, I would teach these munchkins every single day.

Reasons why I love my 3rd grade class the most (I love all my classes, this class just is extra special):

1. It is one of my smaller classes. There are only seven students.
2. They are extremely motivated to learn English. In comparison to my other classes, this class really enjoys simply saying (yelling) vocabulary words. With my other classes, they become bored of repeating vocabulary words (even though the repetition really helps their pronunciation) which is fine, because I end up just playing games that accomplish the same goal. My third grade class has fun with the vocabulary repetition and they actually learn the words, THE FIRST TIME.
3. They are incredibly smart. You see, I made lesson plans for each grade level for the entire semester, and most classes I wish there was more time to teach each topic, but I must move on because I want to cover as many topics as possible. My third grade class is so quick that sometimes I teach two topics in one day. For example, the other day we were learning furniture (bed, desk, chair, dresser, sink, toilet, etc) and we spent the first 20 min going over the vocab (I drew a bedroom and bathroom on the white board and I pointed to each piece of furniture and said what it was). They memorized around 16 vocab words in about 20 minutes. After making sure that they really had memorized the words, I taught them how to read time in English (six fifty, seven oh five, twelve thirty). They got it down in about 3 min. So we proceeded to play the most difficult game that I have played with ANY of my grades. I wrote down about 20 times on the board from 8:00 to 12:00 (8:15, 10:23, 12:36, etc) and then had my Korean coteacher write down the furniture vocabulary in Korean next to each time. For example 8:03-침대. SO, they broke up into teams and I would save 8:03 and they would have to say "BED!" within 5 seconds. Remember, there were 20 different times and 20 different words written in Korean on the board. Each team missed 1 question. The game was too easy. So I switched it around. I would say the English vocab word (BED!) they would have to say the corresponding time (EIGHT OH THREE!). They missed about 2 each. This was a hard game for most of the 5th graders. 
4. They are freaking cute. Just take a loot at the pictures on facebook. They are adorable. Oh heck, I'll upload one.
   
   
5. Nicest classroom in the school. There is a flat screen TV and all the furnishings are brand new 

 I love this class.

John: Smart kid, but he cries if he loses. He loves when we play games.
Tony: So LOUD, but also really good at English.
Ginny: Super cute because she tries so hard! She always makes a really cute face and twirls her finger in the air when she doesn't know the answer to a question.
Rachel: Reminds me a of a mini Ahjumah. :D
Andrew: He's not in the picture because he was sick today, but he is by far the best at English in the class, but he is very humble about it. Very well behaved (the boys at the school are kind of wild, but that is to be expected).
Sam: Not very good at English, but definitely my second favorite student in the entire school. He is just a fun kid.
Julie: My favorite student. She is the one that is afraid of getting a question wrong so she always asks me to give her an easy question. I'm not sure if she realizes, but I've been giving her harder and harder questions and she's been getting them all right. She's super cute. If you have been keeping up, she is Paul's older sister. Straight up, this girl and her siblings are so smart, but they live in such a rural area that it is hard for them to really get a decent education. I'm doing this job for students like her.

I know for a fact that when I'm done with this job, I will miss this class the most. Thank God for pictures.