Teaching Grade School in College

Finally, BOTH Montana sand LuRue got up unwillingly at 6:30, both zombies. LuRue got out of her zombie stage after breakfast, Montana, however, was tripping over air and running into walls until we got in the car to go to school. It was almost like walking into a whole new school for Montana, since she hadn't been there for two days. 

We got there early today, so LuRue and Montana had a few minutes to spare as the class filled in. They started by introducing themselves to the class, then did a short lesson on pronunciation and the difference between words such as heel and hill, which sound very similar. The class was divided into 4 teams to play the homonyms game. There was a piece of paper with 5 different homonyms used in sentences (“one” as an example). The place where the homonym was on the sentence was a blank, so the teams had to write down which homonyms were used. Whichever team got the answer right first would get a point. After that, the class took a ten-minute break. During the break, LuRue and Montana showed post cards from the places they lived to the people who were interested. 

LuRue helping a team

Montana and LuRue started the second half of the class with some Simon Says, which the students seemed to really like. Then, we did another team game where we would give a word and the team would have to use the word in a sentence somehow, for example, DANCE: Do you want to dance? Whichever team got a correct sentence written first got a point. We added the points between the two games to see who won. We ended the day by introducing the "Hokey Pokey". After several duo performances and some coaxing, the students finally joined,too. 

Teams hard at work

There was another ten-minute break before the next class started. The last class had seemed successful, so we used the same ideas for this class. This class had a little more time, so we added a drawing section to the team games. In the drawing game we told the teams what to draw, such as a a house with a bed, and whichever team drew it correctly first got a point. 

After both classes were over, we headed back to the hotel for lunch - some cabbage-like vegetable, a pork dish and a Chinese-style spinach pie. The group exchanged stories of their mornings during mealtime. 

The afternoon was spent looking for a cheap place to get laundry done. We were not successful, even with our amazing charades and Don's ability to speak a little Chinese. However, our hunt for an ice cream store was very successful. Actually, we found three in the same mall on the same level...which to try first? We relaxed the rest of the evening before meeting up with the group again at 6 for dinner and discussing weekend plans, which did involve sleeping in!