Surprise! No Desks!

We were drinking coffee in the office this morning, just before my first class, when I asked my TA to make sure the kids had their markers today. I asked the kids to bring them yesterday, but they’re only 5 so they forget.

“Oh, last night we took the desks out of the English room,” my TA told me.

“What?” I asked.

“The English room is only for playing games now. No more desks.”

“How can they color their letters!”

“You can play some English games.”

I know I make it look completely effortless, but I secretly do put some thought into planning my lessons, and today’s lesson plan did involve the use of chair and desks. Not only because I am an uninventive old stick-in-the-mud who believes in using a flat surface to teach writing, but because both “desk” and “chair” are unit 1 vocabulary words.

One problem with second-language English is that I say “And when were you planning on telling me this?” and they say “Yes”. And besides, the answer was already clear.

Three minutes before first period was when they planned to tell me.

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0 Responses to Surprise! No Desks!

  1. Katie Rabbit says:

    Lovely!

    Ooo PS I have a good game that I play with my ESL crowd sometimes. We all sit in a circle on the floor and we thump our hands on the floor in a horse-running kind of rythm. I explain that we’re on a horse running through the woods….we gallop fast and trot slow (so the kids have to do the same). Then we stop, get off our horses and look around the woods…I ask them “what do you see?” and they have to name an animal that lives in the woods. Then I make a hand or body motion to go along with the animal, we say it in english and spanish, talk about what it eats, what its habits are….IE a bat (it eats bugs, is nocturnal, can’t see well, etc). It’s kinda young, but it works in a pinch and the kids like the interaction.

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