My summer has begun. Of course, all the classes I taught at the Strossmayerovo Namesti Middle School are finished for the summer and those were about half of my hours. Also, though, because people are just used to the school schedule, which is inevitable, what you do from age 5 to age 18 or more becomes a habit that’s really hard to break, most of my adult classes have canceled as well. I’m down to two hours a week, both of them on Monday. So, I’ll have a lot of free time, I will try and crank out a couple more books, although there’s no money in that, and working a lot on translations.
Today was the last class (at least until September) for my group of 4 little girls. I was really pleased with them. It’s very often a struggle as they are only 7 and much more interested in playing than studying, so I try to come up with lessons disguised as games, but if it seems too much like a lesson and not enough like a game, they lose interest quickly and start agitating for something else.
Right off the bat, they started asking for the color tag game, which all kids love but I don’t think it’s a very good lesson so I avoid it. Today, I had no better idea, so I started out with that. Basically, I just say a color and they have to touch something that’s that color. After two minutes, though, I thought of a way to make it more complex. I gave them a color, and they had to say something in the room that was that color – not touch, say. Then, I wrote out “the _____ is white” and had each of them complete the sentence, did that with all the colors and then went back through the list backwards, so they were each reading the other one’s answers. Then, I brought out the flashcards, divided them roughly into four, and they had to make sentences with “The _____ is _____,” and they were really good, and creative, and one of them (driven by the desire to go through all her cards first and win) started using two cards per sentence, which was great, and that gave me the idea for the next lesson, and that took us to the end of the hour.
Students who like to compete are great students.
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