Week 1: A bloody start?

I know...total clickbait title. One of the students broke a red pen on me. I didn't see it happen but students pointed out the red "blood". It ended up on my forehead and skirt so I thought I hit my head and was bleeding everywhere. I legit got super scared!  
Annnnyway...
I started finished my first official day of teaching yesterday! Whew was it TIRING. Let’s start from the beginning:

​Grades 3 and 4
(11:00 – 12:00) - 30 min. per grade

That cow tho.

The third graders and their drawings!

I wasn’t supposed to teach for a whole hour here but I did because the teacher would not let me go. Eh, I guess I should have been more forceful but trust me you do not want these teachers on your bad side – without them, I wouldn’t be able to control the class. That said I couldn’t teach grade 4 yesterday so I did it today instead. The lesson for both classes was an old classic: Animals and Colours. You just can’t go wrong with this lesson. Everyone always loves it! 

For the third graders, I let the kids come up and draw the animals on the board– it worked out well last year but this year the drawing caused some serious chaos. 
​
This one poor kid was trying to draw a lion (sadly he was no Picasso, but I mean who is?) and the class laughed and laughed at him. He took it quite well but the class took a while to settle down again. 
I don’t know if I was just really tired yesterday but teaching felt really hard. I can’t explain it. It almost felt like the students were extra enthusiastic. I am hoping it will be better next week. 
Today, grade four was basically the same but the drawings were on a different level. Check out the cow. 

​​Grade 5
(1:30-2:30)

​This was a small class. Which is a good thing because the teacher left me alone to teach them. Usually, a teacher stays but this year I guess I am on my own. I could control the kids (sort of) and it went well. It’s a very basic lesson – just review honestly. At least it should be review – but it seems somethings are new to the kids. The link below should take you to the page with all the Scholarship Material – the lesson is simple. I write each phrase then we break down the words and try to guess the meaning of the whole phrase. In the end, I give them the Sinhalese translation and they write both the phrase and the translation. 

Back to the chalk life.

Grades 6 - 9...and 10
(2:30-3:30 and 3:30-4:30)

Trust me this picture only shows a few of the students that attended. There were so many!

I really underestimated how many kids would show up…everyone wanted to come to the 2:30 class! Don’t get me wrong I was thrilled at the turnout HOWEVER there were not enough seats in the classroom. Hehe.

Don’t worry we managed. The lesson was just a brief one. I didn’t do a pretest or posttest as I usually do because there really wouldn’t have been a point as there wasn’t sufficient time for the kids to have learned the full lesson. The lesson was called Talking about People.  We learned adjectives and titles of family members. The class was really rowdy. I don’t know why… I feel like they were better behaved last year. 
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To help with the disorderly conduct I decided to split the class up. 6th graders at 2:30 and 7th-9th graders at 3:30. Hopefully, the classroom environment will improve. 

Oh, I forgot to mention! The 10th graders decided they really preferred to join the 6-9 grade class. Initially, I put the 10th graders with the 11th graders. I guess thus class is now the  is now called the 6-10th-grade classes – this means the schedule now goes like this:

Grade 11
​(4:30-5:30)

This is the book I will be teaching out of. There are 10 years worth of past papers!

​They didn’t show up! I don’t know if there was a communicating error or something but hehe no one came…
 
Better luck next week I guess – I will be sure to get the message out and around to everyone. However, if I am completely honest I don’t think any of the students really wanted to come which is too bad – this is just a hypothesis, I hope to be proven wrong. 

The official schedule

​11:00 – 3rd grade (Introduction to Scholarship Exam Material)
11:30 – 4th grade (Introduction to Scholarship Exam Material)
12:00 – I  eat lunch and nap ;p
1:30 – 5th grade (Scholarship Exam Material)
2:30 – 6th grade
3:30 – 7-10th grade (Structured intermediate lessons)
4:30 – 11th grade (O/L exam practice)

They still love taking pictures.

Lesson links... (check out the new color scheme)

Introduction to Scholarship Exam Material (grades 3-4)
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1XPfQV8ECKXPg_ifA-hc1Z-7aLFeFeNH55yJVHXcIeVY/edit?usp=sharing

Scholarship Exam Material (grade 5)
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1k7HcM-wHcvRWCOWw0pllJqdrAqIkgd6NPjcRFGqprtg/edit?usp=sharing

Structured Lesson: Talking about people (grade 6-10)
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1pvcwCMkoCkKCB-Ioq8vKYpyrdoidcvoBxfu9Yb5ul9o/edit?usp=sharing

Grade 11
:P