Under the Sea

Listen to the Slippery Fish song. Now listen to it again. And again, and maybe 100 more times. Add in the dance moves that you are forcing 9-11 year olds to do (even when they tell you ‘this is so kindergarten’), then on top of this spend lots of long hours inhaling felt particles and sewing pom poms and boggly eyes on lots of things and that pretty much sums up our last fortnight. All in preparation for one of Namsung’s English event days, this time the theme was under the sea.

The whole point of an event day is for the kids to have fun, but at the same time practise some vocab and role plays that they may have to use in the real world (I'm not sure how many primary school kids have been on a submarine, but I think that we were stuck for ideas!).

I knew it was bad when I found myself not being able to sleep at night because I was too busy thinking about what I could make out of some orange felt and copious amounts of sparkly pom poms. Just when I managed to stop myself, that song would creep back into my head. Eugh.

So I was kind of happy when event day finally came around, it all felt a little last minute, like everything else seems to be in Korea. We were at school until 11:30 on Monday night, trying to make the classrooms worthy of the Marine Party that we'd promised. Here are the end results...

One of the classrooms// The Event Room// Me and my co-teacher Jinny and the mermaid//
Tasha and another co-teacher Grace// Some of the kids fishing// Jinny and Grace//
Kids playing 'Who's got Nemo?'// Learning about sea creatures// Treasure Chest

I'm absolutely worn out after the last 2 days, but it has been fun! Dressing up as a turtle and getting the kids to fish for prizes is always better than teaching formal lessons. My favourite part was getting the loser of the game to stand behind the Mermaid cutout that we'd made, the kids went absolutely crazy for it, and the loser would always reluctantly poke their face through. Somehow it was always my favourite student that would lose, so I got to have lots of pictures with them - I promise I didn't fix it. I also adored our co-teacher, Grace's outfit, even if it did terrify the kids.

It was quite sad this afternoon to take everything back down and turn the English department back into a classroom. It took us hours to put everything up and less than one hour to tear it all back down again. I'm also kinda sad that I won't get to see them do any more Octopus dance moves, the more grudgingly they did it, the cuter they were! 

I am glad, however, not to hear the song anymore, but think I'll probably be coughing up pom poms for the next few weeks after being surrounded by them for so long.

Finally, thought I would share this video I was asked to make, with hardly any notice, to demonstrate the role play that the kids had to act out. Is it any wonder that I'm a minor celeb at Namsung?! And why am I smiling like a complete goon the whole way through?!