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Saturday, March 2, 2013

Project time!

I love teaching in Korea. It's fun and I don't have to do much planning. 

Exhibit 392: 

A class of 7 year-olds (western aged six) called KG 영재 (young jae). KG for kindergarten, and 'young jae', meaning 'genius' (via the Korean/English dictionary on my phone). This class is awesome because I can have kid-esque conversations with them. In English. How awesome is that? 

With a week and a half to go (three classes left), and having just finished our book, I sprang a final project on them to go with the final unit we just covered from our book about animals. It was a homework assignment given on Thursday for them to have ready by the following Tuesday. They had two options: Create a diorama of an animal in its natural habitat, or create a mobile with pictures of animals and a sentence or two about it. 

The most I expected was something basic and without much thought, thrown together at the last minute with crap from around the house. I really just expected a note from mom telling me to f* off and take my last minute project with me. (I would have hated me.) 

But what I got... What I got was completely unexpected. 

Check these out: 





Top two pictures: Daniel and his diorama. I love this kid. His diorama might be in a box, but his mind is always outside of it. And he's American-aged six. Amazing. And to show just how honest these kids are, he was adamant in telling me that his mom made the lady bug, but he made everything else, and it was all his idea. There is a deer, a horse, a pig, a turtle, and some fish in the lake, and that tree-looking thing in the center is actually a house. Complete with rotten banana on the ground outside of the door, because the people living inside wanted to give the hungry pig some food.

Middle two: Nick with his mobile and Violet with her diorama. Nick cut out shapes of animals and finished drawing them in with pencil. Each is a different animal, and each has a sentence written on the back about the animal. Violet's diorama shows that awesome butterfly in its natural habitat. And too cute - they're both missing teeth! 

Bottom: Olivia and Amy with their mobiles. Olivia folded paper into little multi-colored origami squares and drew awesome pictures of animals on one side, with their backsides on the back of the squares. Amy found some pictures of kittens, puppies and bunnies on the internet, printed them out, laminated them, and wrote sentences about them on the backs. 

And, at six years old, they each presented their projects to the class. Kid-esque, yes, but dude. I wasn't doing that when I was six. In English or a second language. 

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