When First Graders Attack

Alan gave you a little snippet of how his orientations in Kindergarten are going, so I thought I would do the same.  Though I am teaching 1st and 2nd, the school only does orientation for the classes that will be brand new, so I will meet the 2nd graders next week on the first day of school.  Even though most of the 1st graders went to kindergarten at Bahçeşehir (only 7 out of 45 are new) the step to 1st grade is seen as the start of REAL school, so that means they are all new.  My day was relatively easy.  The children spent most of the morning with their "class teacher" and each of the specialty teachers took over for only a half hour, so with two classes that meant one hour of being a teacher.  Should have been a breeze right? Especially since I was tag teaming it with the other two English teachers.  (I am the Speaking and Listening teacher, a Turkish teacher will be the English Grammar and Structure teacher because as American's we don't know any grammar rules, and a third will be the extra lessons teacher.) Out of the three of us, I am the only one who doesn't speak Turkish.

Despite our thoughtful planning, 1 on 8 ratio and only a half hour to survive, we barely made it.  Let me just paint you a picture... the first class we met had about 20 six-year-olds half of whom spent the WHOLE time screaming on the tops of their lungs.  Not because they were scared, or sad, or don't like the way I talk, but because it's funny to scream. Five of the non-screamers played jump-over-the-desk the whole time.  One even climbed up on top of it and did a flip off of it. And that went almost un-noticed for all of the other chaos. The only child who wasn't having a complete hay-day was crying in the corner saying "Be quiet," in Turkish.  A minute or two longer and I would have ended up crying in the corner with him.  Needless to say, I threw out all of my current curriculum plans for that class, and we are going to spend the first few weeks doing classroom management type games.

Luckily, the second class was DELIGHTFUL.  They almost made up for the terror of the first. These kids were excited to hear from us, and to share the English they already knew ("Hello my name is___" "I'm fine thank you and you?" all of their colors, and numbers up to 20!).  They happily played along with all of our games, and were SO excited to sing "5 Little Monkeys," a personal fave.  The best part was the boy who seemed to know the most English in the whole class, who kept saying something to me over and over in Turkish.  ADIMENTLY.  I responded with "No Turkçe, English?" He turned to the little girl next to him who also seemed to know a lot of English and told her.  She shook her head at him, pointed at me, and said "No Turkçe!" I brought him to the Turkish speaking teacher who laughed, and told me that the phrase he had been saying over and over to me was "I don't understand you.  What are you saying?!" I'll be teaching them that phrase in English ASAP. The other one I got was crossed arms a scowl, and Turkish for "I don't WANT to learn English." By the end of our half hour he was saying "bye bye" and giving me a high five.  Such a difference between the two classes.

I look forward to the next few weeks and getting to know them all.  I am very hopeful that my 1A class will settle with a little thoughtful planning, and a lot of patience. For now I will leave you with some pictures of the English room decore. We arent allowed to hang anything on the walls because it makes marks, but we are allowed to paint on them... don't ask me how that makes sense.  Anyway, I made some pretty adorable murals, and had a lot of fun doing it.  (The big animals are for the different "clubs" but I don't really want to talk about those.)