Events (Pajama Party)

Hello,

                Wintermute here bringing you your daily does of Dumbr. Tonight we talk about every child’s dream, a slumber party at school with friends. The best part about throwing a pajama party for your students is it forces your employer to pay you over-time. ;)

                First you will have to decide what your students will be doing; this event will be set up much like the Fair we discussed earlier. Each Class will be a different stage for the kids to venture to. However this time around the kids won’t be involved in the planning process, they are there to have some fun. Here are some ideas:

1.       Bowling: Get some 2 liter bottles, fill them up a quarter of the way with water (not all the way or they won’t fall), tip the desk to make a lane and have the kids play.

2.       Team Games: play some games with all of the classes to promote team work, such as passing a ball behind you first over then under then over until the end of the line.

3.       Team Contest: Make a team with each individual Class, have the team come up with a name and then have them design a banner, and last make a team cheer. All the classes will go to the gym and present their banner and cheer. I’m not too hip on this one, but the kids love it.

4.       Anything really, just make sure it’s fun.

Pick a Friday to have all of your students return to the school around 6:30. Tell your kids to wear pajamas and bring sleeping bags. When they arrive have them drop their stuff off. Let them play the games for however long, after a while though serve them some dinner. Something easy like fried chicken, because who doesn’t like fried chicken?

Then have them get their sleeping bags and head to the gym, turn down the lights nice a dim, get a female teacher and have her read them a story. Hopefully they will all fall asleep. None will however, but rest assured the parents are well on their way and ready to pick their sugar high kids up.

Have fun, enjoy yourself, and stay Dumbr. Be sure to comment and ask questions. Tomorrow, Story Book!

Your seonsaengnim, (pronounced song-say-ee, or teacher in Korean)

Wintermute

Events (Fair)

Hello,

                In the school educational system, the students are represented by two separate yet equally important groups: good teachers who do well and bad teachers who serve little to no purpose. These are their stories. CHUNG CHUNG!

                Naw, I’m just kidding, Wintermute here bringing you your daily dose of Dumbr. Today we will discuss how to manage a mini fair for your students. Basically each class will be responsible for one separate event. If you have a lot of classrooms at your school you may have to get creative. Each class will take turns going around to each other class and participating in the event that class set up.

Stores: We had two stores, a book store (books were brought in by parents) and a toy store (same deal). We set the classrooms up to look like a store with a fake cash register and everything. We even made fake money for them to pass out and buy stuff.

            Arts a Crafts Shop: A place for the kids to go to make wallets/purses to hold their fake 

            money in.

            Drama: Have the kids pay admittance to a theatrical Drama presented by the students.

Gym: Turn the gym into some kind of game they can play, preferably one they haven’t ever played before. Fairs usually see things like Darts, or Horseshoes, think about stuff along those lines. 

Cooking: I’d say have some kind of cooking class, but save it as a last resort. Make sure it’s cheap and easy.

                Be sure to have your kids get very involved. Have them decorate the class and make banners to post up on the walls advertizing their little soiree. This is a good event that will have them practicing their English as they go up to buy something or during the planning process.

                I have full faith and confidence you will do well. As always ask questions and post oyur comments. Tomorrow we talk about Pajama parties, so bring your favorite bedtime story and a glass of water, we’re sleeping Dumbr style.

Your Carny,

Wintermute

Events (Quiz Bowl)

Hello,

                Wintermute here bringing you your daily dose of Dumbr in the classroom. I hope you are ready for our lesson today where we will talk all about how to run a Quiz Bowl for your students.

                Contestants- You need students to compete but obviously you can’t have them all up on stage at once against the entire school. So each class needs to decide on who they will send up. I find it best to hold a mini quiz bowl in class. Draw a bracket on your board and have two kids compete against one another for ultimate fame and glory. Winner moves up, loser needs to study more, do this until you are left with one student.

                Questions- it would be smart of you to make sure that every student is given a fair chance as I’m sure not every class teaches the exact same thing at all times. So come up with a list of questions prior to the main event, be sure to only include questions that relate to all of the classes.

                Set up – If at all possible, get buzzers, microphones, and a big board to display scores. If however you are not as devoted to theatrics as I am then so be it.

                Prepare your Gladiator – Depending on how many classes are at your school, your valiant warrior may stand a slim chance at success. So have a talk with them before hand, let them know that no matter how horrible they do its okay. Be rough and funny. This step is very important otherwise I would not mention it. When I ran the QB apparently the other teachers did not prep their students, here is what happened:  

               Kindergarten QB – 2 children on the floor bawling in defeat. 

               Elementary QB – a child filled with the utmost rage made it well known to the school he                was not happy.

               Middle School QB – one kid was wearing a hoodie, he sunk deep into his hoodie and

               threw his head to the table, and stayed there on stage for a good ten minutes. 

              You may not notice prior to the event, but your students actually do care about this a lot, they do not want to lose. Some kids invite their parents, I discourage this obviously.   Don’t put more pressure on them then there needs to be, they will do better.

              That’s about it; I wish you the best of luck and hope your own Quiz Bowl goes well. Of course please comment and ask questions, I can't get enough of them. Tomorrow we talk about a mini fair that can be run in your school by your students.

Your Event Planner,

Wintermute

 

Events (Speech Contest)

Hello,

                Wintermute here with your daily dose of Dumbr. Yesterday we started our new segment "Events”, today we will discuss one of my favorite events, the Speech Contest.

O: I feel their speech should be short; it’s not about how much they can read off a piece of paper, but rather how well they perform in front of others.

            O: When I have my students go up I do not allow them to read from anything and instead have them give a self introduction. An example would be: “Hello my name is Wintermute, I am 23 years old, and I go to The Dumbr School of Education. I enjoy writing meaningful blogs to help educate the masses who think it smart to become a teacher with no prior teaching experience. “

O:  A simple and short quick self introduction and maybe a hobby.  Things to check for while the students are performing would be, clarity, pronunciation, flow, attitude, and of course comprehension.  If you trained your students well, they should be able to jump up, run on stage, and yell out their speech with pride and honor in their prepubescent voice.  If however you didn't, your student will deny standing up, refuse to go on stage, and pause in front of their peers.

            O: To prevent this, practice in class, I practiced with my students every day, having them talk about their work in front of the class. Also I would do show and tell every Friday. When the time came to perform in front of the whole school my students were smiling and carrying on a conversation with themselves.

O: When other classes went up, they brought up pieces of paper; you could not hear them nor see their faces. Let me ask you something. When your student goes outside in the real world to talk to other people, is he/she going to have a piece of paper to stare from?

            O: As they get better you can of course get more involved and sound less robotic. Have them bring up artwork to talk about, or ask them what planet they would like to live on and why. I had two classes that loved T.V., so I would ask them things like what Pokemon or Power Ranger they would be.

                Thank you all for being here, please ask questions, I love them and will answer them. Be sure to come back tomorrow, where we will discuss how to run a Dumbr Quiz Bowl.

Your Event Planner,

Wintermute

Classroom Games Intro

Hello,

                My name is Wintermute and this is Dumbr, an account of my life and times teaching English as a second language in South Korea. Over the past couple months I have talked about South Korea, Teaching Contracts, common classroom occurrences and discipline tactics. Today I would like to start a new segment, Classroom Games.

                One of the hardest things to do is make class fun, new, and refreshing every day. Parents want class to be fun because it looks like a good learning environment. Managers want class to be fun because they don’t want to send off the impression that English is boring. You want your class to be fun so it doesn’t get dull and boring for you and your students. But the most important factor will always be your students, who also want class to be fun for obvious reasons.

                I think a lot of teachers get this idea that if they play games all day they are not learning. This can of course be true depending on how often you play and what kind of games you play. But understand this, playing fun educational games with the students can show them more practical uses for what you have taught them; it lets them see how they can use their new found knowledge. This week we will cover:

1.       Board Games –Quick, on your feet games that can be played with any size class on the classroom marker board. (Marker board on the wall by the way, not table top in a box board games)

2.       Gym Games – There are games out there other than Duck Duck Goose.

3.       Music Games – Hate singing like me, than have some fun instead.

4.       Word Games – Making students speak while learning a new language? Absurd!

5.       Computer Games – They are Korean After all.

               By the way, a little where am I now? I will be moving back to South Korea next week and I’ll do my best to keep you updated. I will do everything in my limited power to take pictures of my flight trip and arrival, but I’m not much of a picture taker, and not at all a picture uploader. Thank you all for your amazing support, be sure to share this blog with everyone, facebook it, blog it, twitter it. Bring your Questions, and I will see you in class tomorrow!

Your Teacher,

Wintermute

Discipline part 2 (Structure)

Hello,

                Wintermute here and this is Dumbr. Yesterday we started our new segment Discipline. We will continue today with more tips on how to keep your class in check.

Point Cards: Back to structure and repetition, in my class I set up these point cards, good students received a card, bad students lost cards, the kid with the most cards at the end of month got a prize. This worked wonders, all I had to do was threaten losing a card and a child would start bawling and begging for forgiveness. I won’t lie the power  is a little overwhelming, and with great power comes great responsibility, you have to understand that these cards mean the world to these kids, so don’t pass them out lightly, and don’t take them away for every offense. But have a system in place, (if you do A, you lose 1 card), stick with it, they will learn.

Line up: Koreans love to have every student go at the same time for everything (line up, getting bags/coats, washing hands); they seem to think it’s faster. They couldn’t be further from the truth. What happens when 20 little kids try to bum rush a line up, they start to push, hit, cut in line, etc etc. Instead, make a line leader for the day, and then call each student out one at a time to line up behind the other, no fights, no fuss, and no mess. Plus it allows you to make sure each student cleaned up their area, and pushed in their chair.

Teams: Embrace the power of teams.  I was lucky, our desk were color coded, I had two desk for each color, I put those desk next to each other, students sitting at those desk became a member of the subsequent team color. You may not have that option, but form teams somehow. This is amazing and you won’t understand until you see it in action. Kids will try so hard to do well for their team, and it will make them more competitive. Just keep a simple tally on the board of points for whose doing best, the team with the most points at the end of the day gets cards, easy. They really will pay more attention in class and try much harder, and you can use it in other ways. Say something like the team that cleans up first and sits down gets points. The best team in gym will get points. So on and so forth.

Thank you for being here and for your continued support. Be sure to come back tomorrow for more tips on how to keep your students in check.

Your Teacher,

Wintermute

Discipline part 1(Foundation)

Hello,

                Wintermute here and this is Dumbr. We will start a new segment called Discipline. Discipline is one of the hardest parts of being a teacher. I don’t want to brag, but this is one area where I really excelled at, my students were well behaved, listened, and always followed instructions.  But how do we turn our rugrats into well mannered English spouters?

                Children need structure; this is first and foremost, the only way they will learn right from wrong is through repetition. Through continual trial and errors they will learn how far is too far and when to stop. You need to set up the rules, whatever they may be, and always follow them, so that the children know, if I do A, than B will happen. Never change the rules as this will confuse them, it needs to be the same every time with every student.

No Yelling: The big number one no-no, never yell. Okay sure, yelling will work the first time, and the second, heck maybe even the third time. But by the fourth time its power has completely worn off, the students will sit there going oh, that’s just teacher, he always yells. They will learn nothing comes from it, no consequence, just you yelling. Worst part is, they will never take you seriously, so say they are doing something minor and you want them to stop, well they won’t until you get angry and yell, which means you will spend your whole day yelling. What’s next, we all know how much children love to imitate others, monkey see monkey do, well guess what your yelling has started. Use yelling in the most extreme and rare occasions. In all my time teaching I have only yelled once, let me tell you those kids flipped and never did wrong again.

Time out: So what can you do if you can’t yell at them? Plenty. Why does anybody do anything they know is wrong? For attention, the student wants you to get angry; they want you to notice them, the more attention you give them, the more they will act up, and other students will follow suit. They will see that you spend more time with the bad than the good. We want to do the opposite. Now I’m not saying completely ignore the bad kids, but separate them from the main group for a little while. Something simple like putting them in the corner for one minute will do wonders; the kid will want to be with his friends having fun. Remember monkey see monkey do? I had twins who loved to put other kids in the corner when they were upset.

Thank you for being here and for your continued support. Be sure to come back tomorrow for more tips on how to keep your students in check.

Your Teacher,

Wintermute

In the Classroom part 5 (New Material)

Hello,

My name is Wintermute and this is Dumbr, a blog about my time teaching English in Korea. This week we have discussed common classroom practices, and today we continue with how to introduce new material to your students.

Sometimes this can be a little bit more difficult than you would think. Generally speaking my method has always been to make sure you have the classes’ 100% attention the entire time, which I know you are saying “duh”, but it seems to go over looked a lot. I do not allow the kids to have their books or pencils out at all when teaching new material. Otherwise the kids will attempt to follow along or do it themselves and work ahead getting answers wrong, or fall behind the others and get lost.

Instead I spend the majority of the class period teaching, and then at the end let them get their books (no pencils), we do the page/s together in class, I ask if everyone understood, and then let them get their pencils and have at it. For me this seems to be the best method, it allows for no distractions on their desk, and they should know all the answers as we did them together.

 As I said in my earlier post not every kid learns and works at the same speed. This method is good because say you had the books out and tried to do it together in class, you will have every kid sitting on question 2 for 30 minutes when the greater majority could have moved ahead. You should not let one student force the others to fall behind, instead take the time to help that one student.

Something I’m sure few have thought of that I have noticed is presenting new positive and negative material at the same time. There will be moments when you will teach a lot of new words, and I found that depending on the order you teach them it can have very different results. Say you are teaching emotions, I find it better to teach the negative emotions first and then positive. If you teach negative last your students will leave the class feeling… well negative and go home to their parents yelling “I’m sad, hungry, and angry!” Same goes for weather, start with the dark dreary stormy, and then move into bright happy and sunny.

Hope these few tips helped a little, I tried to keep it short as yesterdays lesson ran a bit long. Do come back tomorrow where we will start our new segment on Discipline. Be sure to spread the word of this amazing blog Dumbr, as we want everyone here reading along.

Your Teacher,

Wintermute

In the Classroom part 4 (Level Gap)

Hello,

My name is Wintermute, and this is Dumbr, an account of my life and experiences teaching in South Korea.  Over the past few days we’ve been discussing common classroom practices to help you in teaching your students. Today we will discuss how to deal with a level gap among students.

It’s sad to say, but no matter what you do you will always have that student who seems to be a bit behind. This is very common in private schools as they tend to just shove as many kids in one class regardless of skill level.  When I started I had 7 students, 4 were good, and 3 were bad.  About a week or two later I got many more, the numbers kept increasing and the skill levels constantly changing. I had to find a way to reach out to the students who were behind. Oddly enough, each one had to be handled separately.

Caden: Caden was my worst speaker, you could hardly understand him when he spoke, and he was a major cry baby and hardly ever listened and so couldn’t do his work or answer questions. He was friends with the smartest kid in class and wanted to be friends with everyone. I separated the class in two parts, the Furious Five and Fantastic Four, or good and bad. I would have the two compete in order to show the level gap, the Furious Five did remarkable and could answer every question. I would then ask the Fantastic Four the same questions but they were not able to answer as many. When this happened I had the Furious Five laugh and literally mock the Fantastic Four, and make fun of them. Sounds horrid right? Yes it is and I do not recommend it. However it got wonderful results. Caden was so ashamed, he wanted to do well and be a part of the Furious Five,  Caden was able to see how far behind he was from his friends and did not want to be made fun of. He tried really hard and in a little over a week he was able to move up turning the Furious Five into the Super Six. He continued to do well and became one of my top students.

Kevin: Kevin had to of had issues, when I got him he could not walk or sit in his own chair. When met with any opposition he threw a temper tantrum, we did not get along well at all. His favorite past time was to eat his crayons, I don’t mean naw, I mean bite down, chew, and swallow his toxic crayons. There were other classes at this school; one was the “baby class”. To be put in this class would bring shame and dishonor to your whole family and well being, so of course it made for a wonderful threat. But this wasn’t enough, so I did the opposite of what I did with Caden. Whenever Kevin had a hard time I would have the class help encourage him by yelling out things like, “you can do it”, “we believe in you”, “keep trying”, so on and so forth. It made Kevin really happy to see that the class wanted to accept Kevin as one of their own and so he began to try harder, his mom came in one day to tell me how much better he was doing and how happy she was he no longer ate crayons or pencils.

James: James was my smartest and brightest. This child was way beyond ahead, if intelligence was water, my students could fill a fish bowl, and James could fill a planet. Anything you said, he remembered. I had him writing digits in the millionth place, when I taught ordinal numbers to my class I taught him Alpha through Omega, I taught him French German and Japanese, the boy was 6. And of course he became the class clown, as is normal for smart kids because they get bored, so I had to prepare a whole separate lesson just for this one kid. I could not meet the demands of this student; I would bring him books to read, or printed out worksheets online. He usually spent the day on the board solving some weird riddle I stole from Professor Layton and the Curious Village. I requested he be put in higher level classes but since the managers could care less about education he remand with me.

As mentioned earlier I had both smart and not so smart students. It got to the point where the smart could finish their work in 5 minutes, where as the others could not finish. My solution, have the smart kids teach. Oh I received high praise for this one. Basically if a kid was finished I had that student go around and help the kids who were still working. On the plus side it just made my job that much easier, also to sit and watch my class speaking in full English to one another was rewarding too.  This brought great joy to the managers, sadly I received no pay raise, but I did get more students from other classes…

I bring these up as all of these scenarios could happen to you, and at least one will. You will get a kid ahead or below the rest, you need to take the time to help that kid. I assure you he wants to do well, and really it’s not his fault he isn’t, it’s yours.  Just like adults every child is different; they learn and respond to different methods. Find the ones that work for your kids, I gave up many the break periods and lunches for my kids, and I have no regrets.

Your Teacher,

Wintermute

In the Classroom part 3 (Art/Music)

Hello,

                My name is Wintermute, and this is Dumbr, a blog of my time spent in Korea and some of my teaching methodologies. Today we are going to be talking about ways to handle your music and art classes. I understand that not all of you are singers and few are artist, so hopefully this will give you a few ideas of what to do in class.

Music:

                If you are like me your vocal talent can be compared to the sound of a cat stuck in a lawn mower. This can be very problematic as you could be teaching music class twice a week or more.  Obviously you are going to be using a radio and CD, but honestly that’s not enough to get your kids involved and makes it difficult on them to learn the words. The more into you get, the more into they will get.  You just kind of have to remind yourself you are doing it for the kids, they don’t care if you can’t sing or what you sound like, it’s just for fun.

                A few good tips: I put my music class at the very end of the day, before home time, it was the shortest period in the day and the kids were so tired most just slept through it anyway. I would waste a lot of time talking about what songs we would sing and have them tell me about the songs. Also you don’t have to sing every day, instead give them some large paper to draw with. Pick a song and have them draw out images of that song. This is actually a really good idea because it allows you to see if your kids comprehend the lyrics. It’s one thing for them to spout out random words in any given order, but can they comprehend them and understand what the song is talking about? Every teacher had their own method to test song comprehension, mine was drawing.

Art:

                Sad to say, I’m good at art. But that does not mean I want to overdo it every time art class comes up. Very rarely I had time to actually sit down and prepare a class, remember I had 30 minutes to plan 9 hours of class and do all of my school work like report cards, schedules, etc etc. So I made up a lot of simple projects you can do on the fly with little to no planning. Things like making a starry sky by taking a black piece of paper and a water bottle, fill it up with water and a little white paint, and then squirt the paper. I got some toy cars and paint, and let the kids roll the cars around on paper making paint streaks. You can get some of that floam stuff; it’s really cheap and not messy.  I did tie-dye with my kids, the Koreans did not approve, but the kids sure loved it. Point is it’s easy to come up with simple projects with little time on the clock. Look around and see what you got. Also there are plenty of sites to help with this sort of thing.

I could start a whole new blog on all of the art projects you can do. The point I’m trying to make is you don’t have to be some amazing artist or that creative, and you don’t even need a lot of time.  I hope all of this info helps you plan out better classes for your students and I will see you all tomorrow.

Your Teacher,

Wintermute

In the Classroom part 2 (Brain Exercises)

Hello,

            My name is Wintermute and this is Dumbr, it’s a look on my life and experience in South Korea teaching English as a second language among other things. I was going to talk about Discipline today, however after writing it all out it was about 5 pages long. So I will make Discipline its own segment. Instead I will change the topic; I got a lot of request to learn more about brain exercises to do with your students. So I will share you more of mine.

Acrostics

              Pick the first word, and let’s say something corny like SHARING. Write it vertically on the board and have the kids raise their hand and come up with a word for each letter of SHARING. My children loved this; they were literally begging to do more. Kids seem to really enjoy the simple games; their favorite gym game was the “sit down game.”

Story Game

             I would have the kids tell a story one word at a time, one word for each kid. Depending on their age and skill level you can have them repeat all of the former words said prior to that student, or if not say them yourself. Generally speaking I hardly ever got a real story out of them; it was just for fun. Things took an odd turn when a student spouted out the word panties; I allowed it as it made them laugh like no bodies business. 9 times out of 10 however, the story was “Wintermute teacher wears panties!!!” This helps them construct simple sentences, if it does not flow they must come up with a new word.

Memory Game

             I would draw a 4X4 grid (or such) on the board. I would place the 16 numbers in the grid, one number for each square in a random order, not numerical. I would have the kids look at this for a minute, then erase the numbers, then ask them where each number was on the grid. Good game for helping with their numbers and memory.

Tic tac Toe

             I’d draw a tic tac toe grid on the board, and play with one student. BUT, they could not draw or point to where they wanted their X. Instead I would put my finger in the middle; they would then tell me left down up right depending on where they wanted the X. This is a great game for helping them with their directions.

            There are plenty more games like this that you can play with your kids to help reinforce what they have already learned. I highly recommend it as it helps demonstrate and relate practical uses for what they learned. Come back tomorrow where we will talk about Art/Music and some other class tips.

Your teacher,
Wintermute

In The Classroom Part 1 (Morning Routine)

Hello,

Wintermute here and today we will start our discussion of “In the Classroom” with Morning Routines. I would have to say that this is the most important part of the day for you and your students. It’s a good time for them to fall back into the routine of only speaking English, work their brain into learning mode, and warm up for the hard day ahead.

The morning routine is literally just that, a routine or system that you will follow each and every day, this routine will hardly differ from any other day. It’s a time for the students to say to themselves its class time. So what we need to do is give them things to familiarize with so that each day they know, its class time. Think of it as an ad on T.V., they become so familiar with it that the students just sort of snap into place. I always start with a simple hello, usually repeat a few times getting progressively louder, kids love to yell it back. Then I look at each individual student and ask “how are you?” simple question, simple answer, happy, sad, angry etc. Then I ask why are you happy, sad, angry, etc etc. This gives each student “teacher time” and makes them start talking, that’s what we want.

Then more simple questions, what day is today, yesterday, and tomorrow, what’s the weather. The more advance your class gets you can have them right the days on the board (this uses up a lot of time). When talking with your students make sure to use their names a lot, (or in my case nicknames) as their Korean name vastly differs from their English counterpart. Have a schedule on the board, so throughout the day the kids can see what’s coming up and what they did for that day. This is important because guess what the parents first question to their child will be. What did you do today? So be sure to ask your class and refer to the schedule often.

I made mini books for my kids, a new book for each week. It was about 5-6 pages of simple sentences with pictures. I had 12 students, I would make 6 books, have the kids pair up with another student, and read the book to each other. This is getting them use to speaking in English to each other; the more group activities like this you can work in is great and will help them develop confidence. I would also send the books home with each student so they can practice with the parents.

Then comes brain exercises, my kids loved these. These are simple exercises (I stole from Brain Age DS) that get your kids thinking and ready to learn. My favorite was a play on the classic rock paper scissors. I would hold up paper and the kids yell what beats it, then Id hold up rock and the kids yell paper etc etc. Then you have them yell what loses, you hold up paper they yell rock. Go faster and faster and mix and match lose and beats often.

By now your class is more ready than you are to get on with the day. Again never introduce new material in the morning, keep it systematic but let it feel fresh and exciting. This is also a good time to pass out jobs and roles for your students to perform throughout the day, such as line leader. I also had my students stand in front of the class and introduce themselves, and talk about themselves. Not needed, but an idea.

Your Teacher,
Witnermute