Grade 6 Part II

Most of my elementary students do not have English names.
However, in one of my classes there was a little boy who came up to me and asked if I could give him one. 

I gave him a number of choices, and he settled on the name Peter. 

Then, everyone else in the class decided they wanted an English name as well.
I wrote a number of names on the board, and pronounced them so that they could pick one they liked. 

The names with a dash next to them were the ones chosen by students. 

The names on the board below are the names of some of my friends from BYU and past roommates. 

I even put my mom's name and my own (of course, I put my name on the boy's names list). After a student chose "Evan," I made a point to not let him know that is my name too. 

I decided that I wanted to teach my students the phrases behind/in front, over/under, close to/far from, etc. 

I did this by putting a chair at the front of the room, and talking about my relation to it. 

The students laughed whenever I stood on the chair, or picked it up and put it over my head. 

The curriculum for the elementary English class is really boring. Each week we have a selected reading to do that I read to the class, and then read with the class.
The purpose is to correct their pronunciation. 

Each week I focus on two different letter sounds. 

We then look through the reading for any words with those letters. 

"T" and "P" aren't that difficult, but when I go back and forth between the two sounds really fast, sometimes the students misspronounce words. 

The hardest sounds for them are the letter "L" and the "th" sound. 

I spent two full weeks trying to teach my students how to bring their tongue to the roof of their mouth to make the "l" sound. I tested them each day by having them say the word "album."

Some of them are still struggling. 

The "th" sound is even harder.
However, I haven't devoted too much time to that sound yet.
I feel like we first have to master the "l" sound. 

If the students are good and there is extra time at the end of the class, we often play games. 

They seem to really like hang man.
However, they always guess the really obscure letters first. 

After we finished the round in the photo below, I explained to them that Q and Z aren't always the best letters to guess.
As you can see, I attempted to keep the game going by giving the man clothing, a bag, and a balloon.
He still ended up dying anyways. 

This is a hang man game from a different class.
They were almost as bad. 

One morning I walked into my classroom and found this on the chalk board.
I have no idea why elementary students were talking about the KKK...

Maybe they were just practicing alliterations...

Outside each classroom is a photo of all of the students in the class. 

This is a photo of the photo of my favorite class. 

Students aren't supposed to wear hats at school, but if you look at the boy on the far right, he's wearing a panda hat. In fact, he's not even wearing the uniform like everyone else. 

He also wears the panda hat in class each day, but I don't make him take it off. 

For one of my lessons we were talking about stamps.
I explained that stamps from different countries will show beautiful places in each country. 

I told the students to design their own stamp showing their favorite place in China.
Then I had a few students draw their stamps on the board.