Day 5

After a long weekend which passes really quickly, it was time to return back to the kindergarten. To tell the truth, I kind of missed the kindergarten kids on Monday. Nonetheless, I am glad that I have some time off to work on the readings.

When I reached the kindergarten, my head was hurting quite abit due to my lack of sleep the previous night. As such, this affected my mood that day and I wasn't really in the mood to smile cheerfully and chat with the kindergarten children. On that day, I went to Mrs P's class and some of the children approached to greet me. Moreover, I think children are really sensitive and some of them can sense if their teacher was in a good mood or not.

Mrs P started teaching the children phonics, inclusive of ch, wh, sh, th, and bl. I think it would take me some time to be able to grasp the teaching of phonics as I wasn't brought up learning such stuff. It makes me wonder how I acquired my English language skills when I was young.

Halfway through the lesson, I was being pulled out to help take care of Ms S's K1 class, which was the class that I was originally attached to at first. It was activities and learning corner time and I guided the children to their respective areas. At least for this class, they were more settled down and did not request to change their learning corners all the time, like the nursery class. Nonetheless, for the Library corner group, the children did not have sufficient resources to engage their interest and learning. In fact, for this corner, there were only 3 puzzles which the children have been exposed to for the entire year, and 1 english book which was not at the suitable reading level for the children. I felt pity for the children and decided that I would join them and read the book to them. I also borrowed a book from the other class to read to them.

Soon, it was chinese lesson for the K1 class and I returned to Mrs P's K2 class to help out. They were doing an mini-essay (writing at least 5 sentences) about their favourite toys. Many of them had difficulty coming out with sentences or even spelling. I had to go around and teach them. For some, they wrote similar sentences, meaning that they wrote "My favourite toy is XXX.", with XXX being the only variable. -_-"

After the K1 class' chinese lesson, I resumed looking after them. It was break time and I made the children wash their hands before serving them food. Blur me did not notice the additional plastic bag inside the bag of cakes, which was meant to be a plastic hand glove. No wonder I felt weird serving the food with bare hands even though I washed my hands beforehand. Mrs K reminded me of the plastic bag and serving food became a breeze. Most of the children started eating except for one particular group. I was unaware of the group until much later when I started making my rounds. I was surprised when they asked me, "Teacher, can we eat our food?" I told them to go ahead and they replied, "But we have not sing the Thank You song." It was then did it dawned to me that the children were supposed to sing the thank you song before every meal. The children in this group were so obedient and it makes me kind of sad at the same time that they are programmed to be like little robots. I gave them the go-ahead nod and they started singing before attacking their meals. Hence, note to self, always remember to let the children sing the Thank You song before their meals.

It was A's birthday and he started telling me excitedly about the gifts that he has prepared for his classmates. A is slightly slow in his academic work but when it comes to work concerning his motor skills, he is actually pretty good.

After their meals, they were assigned to draw out what they would like to do during their holidays. When Ms S suggested swimming, most of the kids started drawing that as the activity that they would like to do during their holidays. It seems like for this class, they are wired to be really obedient and listen to all instructions, resulting in an inhibition of their creativity and expression. I hope that with time, the children will learn to express themselves and not "copy" each other's ideas.

When Ms S came back to her K1 class after she has finished helping out with the make up of the K2 class, I returned to the K2 class. They were wrapping up on what they have learnt for that day, especially the phonics. They came out with different words starting with "bl" together and wrote those words in their exercise books. When they are done writing, Mrs P had to check each individual's work and get each child to read out all the words that they have written to her. I helped out and in the end, I had a longer queue of children approaching me. Popularity comes with more work!

Soon, the day ended and boy am I glad. It is a great relief to my heavy head today.

P.S: A K2 girl approached me during Mrs P's class when school was almost over to ask me about the four faces in U.S. I told her that I would get back to her tomorrow. I guess I would probably head down to the library later to get some books on her question and some books for the K1 library corner.