Thai Teaching

Today was our first day of Practicum Teaching before the start of the second semester. In typical Thai fashion our day got off to an usual start when we showed up at our school to find no one there. Confused, we called our field director, who then called the english director, and notified us that he had gotten the days mixed up. The Thai teachers were notified that we were at the shool and around 15 student ranging from 1st-6th grade trickled into the classroom around 40 minutes later than our scheduled start time. Originally, we were suppose to have 2 separate class (divided grades 1-3 and 4-6th) but since only 15 students showed we decided to combine our lesson plans with the other group and improvise a class.

Our class was a success and the students and volunteer teachers had a blast! We started out with teacher introductions, then moved on to have the students create name cards for their desks. After attempting to pronounce their names such as Euu and doondtaan, I know it'll be awhile till I get them all down. Having such a wide range of ages in one class the other group (Sarah, Peter, and Kerry) had planned an ABC activity singing Chicka Chicka Boom Boom with each student being in charge of raising a letter when it came up in the song. Next, Rita, from my planning group did a lesson on weather practicing vocabulary such as Sunny, Windy, Raining, and Cloudy. I was extremely impressed by the english knowledge of the students many already knowing the phonetics of the alphabet, colors, and weather. To end our lesson we played the infamous game of Duck Duck Goose (but changed the words to Down Down, Up: to aide their vocabulary) *Shown in video above . The students loved this game with one little boy laughing and smiling so much he could barely say the words.

Overall it was a great first intro day to teaching and has made me so excited for the beginning of school. The children are so wonderful and polite. For example as I placed a paper down on each child's desk for them to create a name tag they Wai (hangs together in lotus/prayer position) and huge smiles across their faces when they learned they would be using markers. The classroom materials are at a bare minimum and the black chaulk board almost crumbling and hard to read. I know being creative and having fun with teaching this next year will be key to a successful classroom!

Here are some of my students: