The lowest level class in the school had grown so much in the past year that it had filled an entire classroom and needed to be split into two different classes at the same hour. Due to a scheduling issue, instead of my coworker handling all of the newly created classes, I got the new “pre-reader” class. I had gone a whole year without teaching phonics, and I was pretty used to it. Now I’ve got to adjust to the new students I have that are still learning the letters, the sounds, and how to read.
Starting a new class with 7-8 year old students is rough, because anything you do is something new to them, and you’ve got to get over the “dance monkey, dance” stage with these students pretty quick.My first class, students kept poking me to see if I was “real”. Yeah.
If you speak Korean, they are shocked. If you only speak English, they act like you are from another planet. If you ask them to read, they’ll wait for your prompts. If you tell them to write, they’ll pause after every word as if it was a herculean effort to continue. These are the sorts of things that wear down over time, and eventually they’ll learn what to do in class.
One of the girls, in particular has a wicked case of ADD. I’ll ask her to sit down, and while I am telling her to sit down and face the board, she’ll turn back around to talk to her friends. She’s got different ways of distracting herself. Playing with erasers, talking to friends, playing with her bags, playing with a chair, standing around. Anything and everything but looking at a book and studying. She can’t sit still long enough to read a sentence.
I’ve started using peer pressure to keep her in check. I pause the class and just WAIT for her to realize we are all waiting on her. She’ll get the point eventually. Today she turned around and chatted with her friend so often I asked if her chair was broken. I made her stand up, then I turned the chair backwards. Then I told her to sit down again. I said, “If you always face the wrong direction with the chair facing forward, maybe THIS is the solution.”
Of the five students in the class, when reading any sentence together, one of them will get the word correct while the others will just make sounds. It’s never the same student, and it’s never the same word that they get correct. It’s just that if you flap your gums and make random sounds, EVENTUALLY one of the words sounds close enough to be correct.
This is a pretty big adjustment for me. I complain when students can’t write coherent sentences, or don’t listen to my explanations fully before trying to argue their points. Now I’ve got students that don’t KNOW the shapes of the letters yet. They are very cute, and a few of them try hard, but it’s a challenge to go back to the very juvenille behavior and short attention spans of very young learners. It is rewarding to help them grow, and hopefully when they get to higher level classes I’ll know they were helped by my attention, but right now I’m adjusting.
