conversations

today has been an interesting conversation day in my classes. the kids aren't supposed to speak korean at school, but my kids don't know enough english yet to not speak korean... however the older kids (the kindergartners are the oldest in the morning) know a lot more English and it's always interesting to me to listen to them in the hallways and in the mornings when they come in, thinking that my kids will be able to talk to each other like that someday.

 well today there were a couple of moments when i could actually envision that happening soon! while we are watching videos, the kids always like to talk about their favorite colors, but they usually just say the name of the color. they rarely if ever speak in full sentences. today one of them said "i like yellow!" and it struck me that that was the first time they had used a full sentence naturally without any prompting from me! then later, eric was getting ready to pass something to john and he said "john, are you ready?" and i was amazed! eric is pretty wild and doesn't always seem like he is listening but he has an amazing memory - he picks things up easily and then always remembers them! i think as he continues to learn to listen he will become one of the strongest speakers in the class.

anyway that was fun to experience today. it's nice to feel like there is some progress being made haha. another conversation moment was in one of my second grade writing classes. for an exercise we were discussing common characteristics of a tree, a cat, and a person.
one silly kid said "we can eat all of them!"
another kid's immediate response was "no, we can't! we can't eat a tree!"
i don't know if he understood at first why that made me laugh.

Last week we wrote a sensory poem together as a class during writing. we thought of many different ways to describe happiness using our five senses, and i let them choose which ones they would use in their poem. this is lisa's poem which i have hanging in my office now:

She used "my jacket" because she said her jacket was soft haha. anyway i thought that was cute.

i haven't really edited anymore pictures yet haha. i don't really have anything more to talk about except my extreme love for my new toaster oven HAHA i'm so happy that i can now toast, grill and bake. it was expensive but it was worth it to me! this week i made some chocolate cookies from a mix for our Children's Day party on Wednesday. Children's Day was on Thursday, so the kids didn't have school that day and we had a party for them the day before. It was a fun day with face painting, bubbles, balloons, and a delicious lunch!

i will leave you with a new song that i can't get out of my head: Love Alone by Miss A, a popular Korean girl group. I listened to this song at least ten times before I fully realized it was all in English! not because it doesn't sound like english, i think just because i am so used to listening to korean music that has english interspersed in it anyway that i didn't notice for a long time that there was no korean in it...

time to go to a movie! hope mother's day weekend is great :) here in korea, sunday is parents day...