Open Court Reading Book 1 Class

Open Court Reading is another of the American language books my school uses. This class is my last class of the night (8pm) on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. There are six kids--Wesley, Denny, Gyu-ho, Emily, Losa, and Rose. For a week or so I though Rose was named Lose because of the whole Asian L/R phenomenon, and I thought her name might be a foreign name related to Losa, like Marie and Maria. But no, her name is just Rose. Haha.

These kids are about ten and eleven by our count and are my second most advanced class right now. They have a speaking ability at a similar level to native speakers not too far below their age. They just have trouble with complete sentences and minor, common errors like omitting articles. Articles are apparently one of the most difficult aspects of English, and I'm constantly correcting almost all my students over them.

Wesley is my favorite student out of all my classes. He's a good kid. I think he's going to be a little heartbreaker when he grows up. Wesley participates the most of all the kids in his class, and usually gives pretty good answers. A lot of his responses are totally irrelevant, though, and I'm glad that we have kind of a casual environment so I can make fun of him in a nonmalicious way. It's funny when he says something that he sort of knows is wrong, so he says it softly, and then covers his face and says, "No no no" when I ask him to repeat himself.

This is Wesley. He's the only kid to let me take a picture of him in this class. He started reading my blog, and wrote me an email about how much he enjoyed it. His favorite part was my remark that the picture that I sent with my application to teach was horrible.

Denny has the habit of saying something and then reneging, too. He participates often, also, but doesn't always get it as well as Wesley. He's pretty bright, though. He and Wesley fool around a lot, but at least they're not as out of control as my Avenues B class.

Gyu-ho is a funny guy. He's a great student in that even though he doesn't have the best idea of what's going on in the class, he still tries to answer as much as he can. I think he's improved a little in his ability to speak since I first got here. At the very least his participation has increased. I'm trying to get him to improve his writing, though. Every time we read a new story, I assign vocab sentences as homework once or twice, and I'm encouraging everyone to write sentences that show me they know what the word means. He hasn't gotten it perfect yet, but we're working on it.

Emily is the only girl in this class who participates. She's pretty smart. She seems to have a good comprehension of some of the more advanced ideas I present, even though she doesn't always fully understand. The best thing about Emily and the boys is that they ask questions when they don't understand, instead of allowing themselves to dig a deeper and deeper hole of confusion.

Losa and Rose don't say much. I have to call on them, and I usually find that they have very little to say. Losa I think just doesn't like speaking in front of others, because her homework is generally quite good. Rose I think may be in a little too deep for her level. She was tested into my class a couple weeks ago, but she rarely is able to finish her homework, so maybe she just had a good testing day.

2/27 Update: Rose is no longer in my class, as of the end of last week, I think. I find these things out from the students, as opposed to being told by my boss, so not only do I not know about it until after the fact, I also don't know the reason for it. Poor Heather--she's got so much to do running the place that she doesn't have time to get it all done.

I brought my camera to class today to take pictures of my OCR classes, but this class did not let me. They did ask for my blog address and my email addresses, though. I wonder if I'm going to get a bunch of emails from my kids now.