Okee dokee!! Long post coming up! I am loving teaching so much!! My first day of actually teaching by myself was partially taken up by a field trip to a grape farm. How the day works is during the first part of the day, from 10:00 till 2:30ish, we have two kindergarten classes. these are the five year old class, (Jimmy, Hugh, and Dennis) and the six year old class (Sally, Henie, Mickey and Jessica) They all choose english names since this is an english language institute. (in the afternoon we got some great ones like Rabbit and Sun) In the afternoon we have different groups of elementary schoolers each hour who just come in for that hour before they rush off again to piano or taekwondo or swimming or whatever afterschool lesson they have next. These kids are so hardcore about their schooling!! they spend ALL DAY in some sort of school. anyway, today the kids had on their special field trip uniforms and were SO adorable!! I took about a million pictures! We arrived at school and all piled into the school van. Kris, the co-director, drove us through farms and down back roads till I was COMPLETELY lost! Then somehow we ended up in the middle of this HUGE grape arbor / farm. The cool thing about where I live in korea is there are GIANT apartment buildings, I'd say upwards of 30 stories high, in the middle of a HUGE field. They need every inch of growing room they can get so the farmers live in apartments. Also in the city, well at least in baebang, which is where I live, there will be front yards full of corn and squash, a divider fence of hot pepper plants and a carport with climbing watermelons all over it. Every where you look there is food being grown! It is so cool! if the US did this we would have enough food to feed the world! There is almost no grass on my walk to school, just city streets and crops. anyway, the grapes. We all ducked into the grape canopy (the kids could stand upright) and each child got to snip off two bunches of grapes. We explained to them first that the bunches they picked had to be all black, or they were not ripe. Then we took group photos and left for the day to go eat lunch. we ate l
unch, all food that was provided by the school and was ALL delicious, none of it was spicy at all! We went to a georgeous park and spread out shiny mats that we put the kids backpacks on to stabilize. It was the most lovely fallish day and we just ate outside. I took some cute pictures of the kids eating with their trainer chopsticks... (THOSE are adorable) after lunch we all laid down on the mat for a nap in the sun, but instead of a nap it turned into a giant ticklefest!! It was so great! on the way back to the school, two of the boys had emergencies, so we just pulled the van over and they went on the side of the highway! when we got back to school was when my actual lessons began. but I will post about that some other time, just know it went great!!! I am so psyched about teaching as a career! I am really really
good at it!! love yu all and miss you all!
Lauren