Teaching Class 5/6

Well before I begin, apologies if any of you were offended by the last post. In one of those moods. I am aware not all of you were to busy, since that's what some of you said to me, but you were inaccessibly (hence the extra bits). To a large degree, the inaccessibility is my fault since I can't get out of Stratford on a Friday night and can't finish work early to leave in the afternoon. Anyway, apologies made, just wanted to have a bit of a rant.

Teaching! Can't beat a bit of teaching. The second week consisted mostly of working on what we thought the weaknesses of the various classes were. One thing they all shared right across the ages was pronunciation. They could all sing the alphabet, A B C D E ext. Sing it to yourself, until you get to G. Now say the word 'egg'. Say the word 'egg' as if you believe all G's were pronounced the way they sound in the alphabet song. You get something like 'ejj'. So we worked with all the classes on saying the sounds as they sound in most words (obviously it varies and is very difficult).

Today I will be concentrating on what we spent the week teaching Class 5/6. These were the oldest of the students and one of the most enjoyable (and by far easiest) classes to teach. I want to start including more pictures in my blogs. I don't have many from this week of teaching, but here is one of my favourites from the week before. There is more information in previous blogs about the game, but put simply, they were standing on a raised edge of the play area and had to move themselves to be in the right order for the words they were holding to make a sensible sentence. They couldn't touch the grass behind them or the pavement in front. It was all about fun and team work, as the other team watched on, trying to both help and hinder them.

In Thai, they don't have the word sets that we do for building sentences. For the most part they just have the specific nouns, like 'table'. They do not have words like 'I' 'me' 'you' 'they' ext. So for them building up the basic sentences are very difficult. In the first week we had them saying "I like football" after we asked them "What do you like?". They didn't know what the words 'I' and 'you' were, and what the difference was when you use them in sentences. So Vanessa wrote out some cards, the idea behind them would be to mix and match them to create sentences that made sense. Each card was double sided, with one side containing the 'opposite' of the other. For example; "he" on one side and "she" on the other. There were the 'who' type words (I, you, he, she, we and they). Another group of joiners (am, are, is). Finally, the feeling, keeping it simple with just 'happy' and 'sad'.

We spent the whole week working on this, not just throwing them straight into the deep end. So we began with the difference between 'you' and 'I'. We pointed at one of the students, saying 'you'. And then another one, again saying 'you'. Then we pointed at another, but didn't say anything. They pointed at themselves and said 'you'. Jumping in, we pointed at outselves and said 'I'. Then he repeated, I. As did the whole class. We pointed at some more, and everyone was shouting 'YOU!'. Then I had one of the boy point at himself, and he said 'I'.

With 'you' and 'I' done, we moved on to 'he' and 'she'. We had two boys and two girls stand up. We repeated 'you' and 'I' one more time. And then pointed at the boy and said 'he'. Everyone repeated. Then pointed at the girl and said 'she'. Everyone repeated. We then pointed at the other boy. Everyone was silent. One person shouted out 'you'. "Yes! ... but... what else?" pointing again and again. One girl, probably our favorite, Panadetta (not sure on the spelling), said 'he'. "YES! He!!" And then we pointed and the second girl, Panadetta once again got it right, with 'she'. Repeating this with more boys and girls, and more people joining in.

Now on to 'they' and 'we'. Divide the class into a three groups and have them standing in the groups. I took one group, Vanessa the other. Pointing at the other groups we established 'they'. Then we waved our arms in an encompasing 'we' way, and said... shocker... 'we'. This worked well we thought.

In the next lesson we worked hard on linking each of these with the appropriate joining word. So 'am, is, are'. This is pretty self explanatory. After going through them, and running some practice games where we pit class five against class six. We would say for example "we". There would be two children up at the board, one from each group, and they would have to point at the appropriate joining word. The first gets the points. It works well, and after a couple of games they know it all very well. We introduced the cards, and started having them produce these small sentences.

More games and words were introduced and played throughout the rest of the week, reinforcing all the work we had done with them. They picked it up very well and almost all of them knew it. I really enjoy teaching this class because they are not only so good, but enjoy working on new things and really put a lot of effort in. But you really do need to keep them busy because when they get distracted they quickly disengage and it can be very difficult to win them back.

In the next blog, I will talk about the other two classes and what we did with them and the games we played, the words we taught and techniques we used.