The Day Before the Day Before Vacation

Tomorrow is the last day before everyone has fifteen days off to celebrate Dashain. Naturally, my school will be having a special Dashain program rather than any classes all day. (By special program, I am anticipating approximately four hours of students dancing and singing. Not that I don’t enjoy these types of programs held for various occasions, but the more of them I attend the less the cultural novelty is able to outweigh the feeling of being trapped inside an elementary school talent show where there aren’t any cuts. I’ll let you know how this one turns out.)

Anyway, when I found out (on Monday) that instead of four remaining instructional days I only had three 40-minute class periods to provide closure to the units in each of my five classes… I still wanted to have a fun last day with my kids. I temporarily adopted some unfortunately typical Nepali teaching strategies (like going way too fast for most kids to keep up, and just writing the answers on the board so that everyone can at least copy the correct words into their books) and successfully closed the units in every single class! And it’s okay if they didn’t understand because once teachers finish the textbook, they just go back to page one and repeat the activities. Sigh. Only one enormous problem at a time.

After two harried days, today was a reward for everyone involved. I taught every single class a new game and it was great…if not always exactly as I had planned. (For any of my other ETA/teacher friends, I tried to include a decent description of each game in case you are looking for new ideas to try. Let me know if something doesn’t make sense.)

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My grade two co-teacher was in school today, but when we got to class she sort of looked around and then said “ke garne?” which literally translates as “what to do?” Recognizing that a class with 27 children ranging in age from 7-14 will rapidly spiral out of control without some kind of activity, I taught them how to play fruit basket with the days of the week. Whenever I need a few moments to organize my plan for a class period I didn’t realize I would be in charge of (at least a few times a week), I stall by rearranging the seats. I make a big deal of thinking about which students to send to empty chairs and the exact placement of benches when I really just need a mostly circular shape. After a minute of furniture rearranging, I had successfully modified the game to fit this class.

Basically each kid got a little slip of paper with one day of the week written on it. With some help from my co-teacher and excessive gesturing on my part, the kids learned that when their day was called they had to stand up and find a new seat. The kid who got stuck in the middle gave their paper to the previous middle person (that way the days got circulated around and the kids got practice reading/listening for more one than one word). Total number of violent crashes due to kids running to get a seat: two. Total number of bleeding wounds: zero. Rachel-1, universe-0.

In grade four, we played a game that tied together comprehension questions, running, and a secret coded message. It was classic. (Shout out to Christine Stone for inspiring this game!) Pairs of students received a sheet of paper with eight questions on it. The eight answers were on separate sheets of paper stuck with sticky putty (blue tack) around the school courtyard. While keeping their arms linked, pairs had to run around trying to match the answers to the questions. In the corner of each answer card was a “secret letter” that they wrote in the box next to each question; which means that at the end they had a letter for number 1, number 2, etc. Then they used the number-letter code to figure out that the message at the bottom said “Happy Dashain!”

This game went really well for several reasons. Most importantly, this particular co-teacher is fabulous. Her kids are never out of control and even when I am teaching she is actively involved. She plans, she makes materials, she is awesome. I love working with her and I’m willing to put in some extra work prepping for games like this because I know that she will take the ideas I share, adapt them to fit her teaching style, and use them again. Before I could even offer to show her how I set-up the game, she came to me to verify what she had already figured out and ask for an extra copy of the student worksheet that she could hold on to for future reference. I have an international co-teaching crush on this woman.

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Grade five was… well grade five. This is the class that prompted a desperate facebook plea for classroom management ideas. This is the class where my “I’m-so-disappointed-in-you” eyes and “you-do-realize-I-saw-that-don’t-you?!?” scowly face might as well be tattooed on my face. There is something endearing about this class, but they also possess a significant migraine-generating power.

Anyway, I was really hoping that between myself and my co-teacher we could manage an exciting team game. Unfortunately, something came up so instead of two adults versus grade five it was one non-Nepali-speaking-ETA versus grade five. No time to be sad or irritated, the longer you let this group sit without direction the more painful it will be for everyone involved.

In this game I split the 30 kids into five teams. No, not five even teams of six, because they all refuse to work with anyone of the opposite gender so I had three girls teams (6, 6 and 4) and two boys teams (6 and 8). We moved to the one large, open room in the school (normally I use the courtyard for big exciting games but it was raining hard during this class). I spread out the groups and spent five agonizing minutes trying to explain the rules while also trying to maintain my pronounced conviction that I will no longer talk over students. Every time I am interrupted, I restart my sentence. Sometimes when I get to the fourth repetition I worry that I am actually losing more students with each pause because they’ve already heard what I’m saying, but I really do believe in consistency so I’m sticking with it.

Basically, each group could send one runner to pick up a question and return to their group. When the group had written the answer, the runner would return the paper to me. A correct answer would earn them their next question and one or two puzzle pieces. An incorrect answer would earn them a shrug and “nope, try again.” Once the group had correctly answered all eight questions, they would have all the pieces to complete the puzzle. I even spent the night before coloring, laminating, cutting, and numbering five identical puzzles in the name of fairness.

 

The first group to finish the puzzle won immunity (sorry got caught up in the fact that the game was inspired by a survivor challenge and that sometimes I wish I could send class five to a deserted island far away from me)….the winning team got their picture taken and the joy of victory! (I try not to take things personally, but this class does not encourage me to spend money on prizes for them – that and I’m trying hard to avoid starting an extrinsic reward addiction that could prevent me from ever effectively teaching them to be self-motivated, independent learners.)

Overall, it went pretty well. It would have been easier if my co-teacher had been there so that I could have let her pass back the tests while I set-up the chairs. It would have been more fun if the kids had been quieter so that the ratio of teacher talk time to student engagement would have been better. It would have been awesome if some of the teams had chosen to follow the rules rather than blatantly cheating. But when in doubt look to the most important criteria: number of fatalities = zero. Thus point for me.

1,389 words in and you’re still reading. Wow. You must be a parent, grandparent, really sweet friend, or someone who is intensely procrastinating. Whatever the case, don’t worry, the last two games won’t take as long to explain.

In grade one, we made trail mix. Or some strange Nepali version of trail mix based on a hodge-podge of ingredients that I found at the grocery store earlier this week. The lessons in grade one social studies (did I mention that I teach social studies in English, rather than just English, in this class?), this week have been about making homemade food and weaving things. On Monday, we made a whole class woven poster and today’s trail mix activity was the closest I could come to any kind of food prep in a classroom where “share the crayons” is a daily battle.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It doesn’t really matter what we do, these kids are cute. When I take out my camera they will get quiet and sit nicely so that I will take their picture so it’s a win-win for me: adorable photos of tiny Nepali children doing “Cheers!” with plastic cups of snack food and a mostly under control classroom.

 

Grade three has similar behavior challenges to grade five, but with this group I can clearly see why it is so difficult to get them all engaged: half of them can read and half have no idea what’s going on. Since the teachers have never studied, or witnessed, effective differentiated instruction (changing that reality is my biggest goal this year) basically every activity in grade three leaves half the students totally disconnected and thus out-of-control.

I taught grade three for the past two weeks, so this week was supposed to be my co-teacher’s turn to do a unit. Somehow I still found myself solo in the classroom twice. Today, the teacher assigned homework for the kids to do over Dashain and then literally said to me “it’s the day before vacation, I can’t teach.” Hmmm. Okay, I’ll play bingo with the kids using vocabulary from the story we’ve been reading! Fail. They just all chose not to participate. Rachel-0, Class Three-1.

My next brilliant idea was to teach them red light, green light. I figured two simple words, two simple directions, easy. After a few times of sending every single kid back to the starting line for not stopping on “red light,” they started to understand. As the front runners got close I braced myself for the next green light run that would surely send at least five students clamoring to slap my hand first. I’m not sure why, but no one stopped to hit my outstretched hand and instead they just kept running right on by. The rest of the kids followed. So for the next 5-7 minutes I stood in the middle of the courtyard yelling Red light! Green light! while a rowdy class of third graders essentially did laps back and forth. Do they know how to play the game…not really. But did I manage to occupy the rest of the class period, and did I pick up a potential new strategy for using up some of this group’s energy…yes, yes I did.

 

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It was a long, but enjoyable day before the day before vacation. If nothing else, I will not feel the slightest bit guilty taking two weeks off from this madness.