Today was my first contact with real live Taiwanese students. To be honest, they were the winners of an English language speech contest, so they were about twice the proficiency of the average student, but they were awesome kids. Considering that today began sick, rainy, an-hour-and-a-half earlier than most days, and with a classroom lesson that was fairly rough around the edges, today was also awesome.
Why? Because we had a field trip to the Crab Museum! And I thought the day was going to get significantly worse when I was assigned two rambunctious boys from 4th grade as my charges for the field trip. They were bonkers during lunch, and definitely excitable during the guided tour of the Museum. But once we were self-guided with a few discussion questions (which I wrote, but got unfortunately formatted into something that looked like a classroom worksheet), the little guys were sponges of information. They had the most amazing observational skills and I almost burst into tears of joy when the one guy said "Teacher! Teacher! This one is missing a leg," and then continued to synthesize information from the guided tour about how crabs can regenerate limbs.
And that is why this week's word is "xie," meaning crab. Now, put on your critical thinking skills and figure out how to say "crab meat." You'll earn points for your team. I promise. Or a sticker.
2 comments:
xie-ro!
Yay for self guides and excited 4th grade students! (Regenerating legs is a great way to get that age group engaged. I'm glad to hear that it's going well!)
You want ME to learn Chinese ?!?!? Actually, the boys look a little young for you.....
There was never any doubt that you'd be successful and it IS a rush when you KNOW it's working out. Keep up the good work!
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