Here is a collection of videos I have taken in various classes at my schools. I really love my job. The opportunity I have really gives me the chance to help the teachers. I've developed great relationships with all of my 19 teachers. They are all happy to see me, and I have a lot of fun with them and the students.
Typically, I go to a school for about 5 hours a day, spending 2-3 hours of that in the classroom teaching with the normal teacher. We plan activities together and do them.
One of the big goals is to help with phonics - the new curriculum is very phonics friendly, so I am trying to get the teachers to teach phonics for reading, pronunciation, etc. Every week it gets better, as more teachers realize it works!
Today was a great day at the school. In my first class, the topic was eating (particularly fruit). They made fruit salad in their class yesterday (with real fruit), so today we made imaginary jam. First they "picked" fruit from the fruit trees (papers saying "banana" or "mango" stuck to the whiteboard where I had drawn trees). Then, I got my bowl and spoon and started mixing, asking for all the mangoes, bananas, apples, etc. Each time, I had a child "try" the jam, saying it wasn't ready yet. Finally, when all the different fruits were added, it was perfect, and all the kids wanted a taste.
To follow that activity, which went really well, we sung a song: "I like fruit, yes I do. I like fruit, do you?" Very simple, but they loved it. After that, we played my second favourite game - upset the fruit basket. Of course they loved this game. I even got students (who were 7 years old) to lead the game - so there were 20 seven year old ESL students speaking and listening and lots of laughing.
Then I went to another class, where the teacher is also doing phonics. Her kids are older (9) and the class is bigger (about 32, which actually I have some classes with 43!). I taught the teachers a phonics sound jump game where students all get a letter/sound and when the teacher shows a card with the letter/sound, the students must jump, say the sound, and do the action with the sound (example of actions are bouncing a ball for "b"). She modified the game and made it more of a group game. It was amazing! You can see the pure enjoyment of the kids below. After her game, I had story time, reading Hop on Pop. They giggled throughout the story, as the pictures really are funny. Then they played a game where they had to match rhyming words with other students. It also went really well. Enjoy this video:
Malaysians LOVE spelling. In every English class the teacher will say "How to spell....?" (which is Malaysian English for "How do you spell...?" about 20 times, at least. The kids then repeat M-O-N-D-A-Y-MONDAY. It's good, but not really, as they focus on spelling but not using and speaking (only parroting). Anyway, I can't change everything, so here is phonics spelling - a blend of the two. The teacher gives a word to the student and the student "spells" the action. The other students have to guess the word:
Something popular in Malaysia is their English competition days. They do public speaking and storytelling, two things common for us in the west, but they also do "Choral Speaking" and "Action Songs". Perhaps you've seen this before, but in a competition setting, these were new to me. Enjoy: