I should write about something positive now.
I have a Friday kid’s group of five 7-year olds. I call them “My Friday Rugrats” because of their lack of attention and cooperation at times. They’re really smart, but two boys talk to each other (and themselves) in Japanese, and distract the girls.
I figured out how to manage them, though, with an immediate point reward system which equals stickers in the end, along with assigned seating. 🙂
Now they’re 80% better.
Our focus is on vocabulary and memorizing set phrases to speak. However, we are also supposed to teach blended sounds, even though our main focus isn’t phonics. It’s kind of hard with the materials we’re given. We’re only given a book with sounds written, like “o” and then a few words with examples like orange, octopus (that they can’t read) and sk/squ/sn (skip, squirrel, snowman). So I’ve been using the older kid’s “blends books,” which are colorful picture books with the word “Squirrel” on one side, and the picture of the animal on the other. Basically, it’s sight-sound recognition. They only need to hear “squ” and identify /squ/.
This system just got implemented recently, so I wasn’t confident that the kids would really GET it. But this past week, I did various review game, and I saw that they got it! When they did the karuta game, the slap-game, most of them were very competitive! I uttered the sound “Sh,” and they all raced to hit the card with the picture of the “shoes” on the front. Then I said a totally unrelated word, like “Shinjuku” and they were able to understand that “sh” was the first sound of the word.
I was very proud of them. Except one girl slapped “Sn” when I said “rabbit.” ^^;; Oh well.