December 14th, 2013 - Teaching kids how to spell

• So during last week's oral English competition, I found out that my first grade students don't understand letters
• The first thing they learn in English is "A-B-C-D-E..."but to them it's just a song and few kids actually grasp the fact that "Oh, this is something that would be helpful to actually put into practice when learning English"
• I had so many kids confuse the word "dance" with the name of a character in their textbook ("Danny"), that I once told a kid in frustration, "Danny is dead!"
• Out of the 55 or so kids that I tested, only 1 pronounced dance as dance and not Danny
• ONE!
• So this week I taught them how to answer the question, "How do you spell (insert English word here)?" 
•  I can't tell you how many kids pronounced "i" as "e" because in Chinese phonics, that's how i is pronounced
• Then there was the case where a few students pronounced "j" as "g" but luckily there weren't that many of those kind of kids
• Then there's the letters that Chinese doesn't have like "x" and "v" where some of the kids just completely blanked on
• They would be reading the word so fast and then I knew when they blanked because they would just stop like they saw Brad Pitt walking down the street
• Me:"How do you spell 'cardboard box'?" 
• Student: "c-a-r-d-b-o-a-r-d b-o.......o.......o"
• Me: "Wrong, I wanted you to spell cardboard box, not cardboard booooooo"
• Got to teach a class on water safety
• I'm going to Taiwan and Hong Kong next week for vacation so I had to change some classes around in order to make up for my missed classes (we get December 24th and 25th off for Christmas as Shenzhen foreign teachers which is extremely nice)
• One of the classes I had to teach was a Chinese language teacher's class and normally I would have just taught them English because, that's my job, but I HAD to give them a powerpoint presentation on water safety so  I taught them about water safety in Chinese
• It was actually really easy, I just read the powerpoint presentation character-by-character with them
• It's really humbling when a 6 or 7-year old first grade student knows a Chinese character you don't
•  "Sorry kid, I'm not Chinese, let's see you read Macbeth and see how well you do (sticks out tongue)"
• Then there was the part where the screen was a little bit out of adjustment, and that all important "don't" word wasn't on the screen for students to see
• "So everyone, read with me, 'push and pull children into dangerous...' wait what?"
•