Now that I have gotten used to giant millipedes, living next to a beach, and pesky mosquitos, I have finally gotten my first practice in what I came here to do: teach.
This third and final week of my TESOL training course is practice teaching. Everything that I have learned over the past 2 weeks will actually be practiced on real live specimens. Today we went to an orphanage about 30 minutes away from Nai Harn beach. We were told that in partners we should be prepared to teach up to 25 students ages 7-9 year olds. We were prepared to have some younger visitors to the class because they didn't want to miss out on the foreigners visiting the orphanage. All 28 of us were split up into pairs and spread in 3 different rooms. Fortunately, my partner Amy and I were first to go in our room. Our given topic was cartoons, so we used familiar cartoon characters to teach the children the words duck, cat, mouse, boy, and sponge. The kids were fairly receptive and already knew some of the words. However, we only had 8 kids, most of whom were no older than 7.
Though we over prepared for the amount of children in the class and under prepared for their vocabulary ability, the kidswere extremely well behaved and fairly receptive.
I had a great time with the kids and so happy that I got them first became they got rambunctious by the 4th and 5th lessons. I am still unsure of what age group I will be teaching, but I'm really excited to start teaching and get to know my students and their ability so I can actually teach them and help them improve on their language skills.
Tomorrow I am teaching hospital vocabulary in the last time slot of the day, so I will be the one handling the wild children. Later this week we will be teaching older children in a juvenile detention facility and an orphange for children who excel in soccer.
Overall, I am so excited to be Teacher Laura and for the next few months ahead!
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