A kindergarten test?
Korean life June 7th. 2006, 10:19pmIt’s simple to make things a much bigger deal of things in kindergarten. Some dramatic actions and funny voices can turn a boring lesson into a fun one. The students take cues from your actions to judge how they should act. Moving a few chairs around and acting shocked at the importance of a paper instantly turns a worksheet you prepared into a "test" that the students take seriously.
I had worked out that my students needed to work on a paper I had made to correctly color and find the pictures of the words they knew. If I had let them work together, they would have finished it too quickly and probably wouldn’t have gotten anything out of the exercise. Instead, I separated them to sit along at a table, set crayons down in front of them, and called for silence as I explained we were having our first "test".
The students were remarkably serious about it for their age. For the first ten or fifteen minutes they all worked in silence, asking me only to repeat the questions a few times. Most of them should know all their colors by now. The few times they didn’t know a word they would try to cheat, or ask each other in Korean. This is pretty normal for most tests I give. Students just assume I don’t know what is going on when I start giving tests. I kept walking in between cheaters and disrupting their line of sight while subtly suggesting they kept their eyes on their own paper. Occasionally I would give hints when it was clear they were frustrated.
I saw a few parents sneak a look at what I was doing since my class is usually a raucous affair always teetering on the edge of chaos while still managing a fine thin line of English education at it’s core. This quiet was that unnatural sort of still that makes parents nervous. Clearly, we were up to something and this was the calm before all sorts of noise would be made. I managed to get them out the door before anyone got really loud and restless. Everyone got "good job" enthusiastic praise for their effort and they proudly showed their papers to their parents.
The parents needed a little help understanding how a page of coloring was a test, but once they understood it was a listening, color, and directions sort of test they were happy with the results.
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