Christmas Day lessons

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December 28th 2008

Published: December 28th 2008

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rosy59

Lessons on christmas day

Kim Zwalf and myself planning what to do next

Its business as usual on Christmas Day in China, so our classes went ahead as per normal.
SSPU did allow us to rearrange and make up classes so we could have the afternoon off, but I still had 2 x 80 minutes classes to teach on Christmas morning.

Kim one of the other ESL teachers and I decided to combine classes and we organized a big room plus enlisted the aide of our 2 partners, Karl and Roly, as assistants for the morning.

ESL in China needs to focus on speaking and listening. On the whole the students reading and writing ability is very good, but they lack the confidence and bravado to speak up, so you can turn anything into a good ESL lesson as far as I’m concerned, from reading the junk mail to listening to a weather forecast.

Lessons that day consisted of a quiz where they had to ask 16 different people, not from their class, the questions we had prepared, and see if that person knew the answer. We gave out little prizes and this went down well, with the students having to get up and talk to people around the room.

Lessons on christmas day

Arranging the 2 classes up the front of the room

A word unscramble written on the board was the next activity. Four of us teachers, all wit post grad degrees, took about 40 minutes to work out the answers to this earlier in the week, but the students did this easily in about 15 minutes!!!!!

We finished off by singing “Jingle Bells”, and “Santa Claus is coming to town” in English. Carols are well known in Chinese, you hear them in every shop and restaurant for the month prior to Christmas.

Last activity was singing Silent Night in English and then in Chinese, lead by some of the students. Most of the students sing very well and in tune, singing in parks is a favourite activity for some of the older population, and you often hear people singing away when they are walking or riding bikes, so music I think is an activity all children are exposed to from an early age.

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