Survived the First Week

I've been in China almost for two weeks now, but I just finished my first week of teaching. We spent our first few days in Zhongshan doing training and hurriedly planning some lessons, then we started right in on Monday. I didn't know quite what to expect, and I was rather terrified, but I survived, and I have a better idea of what to do now.

The school I'm teaching in is quite adorable. It is a pre-school/kindergarten, so it only has ages 2–6.

I am teaching a class of 4–5-year-olds. My class has seven kids in it. I teach them for a half hour, then we go outside for to play for a half hour before going inside and helping the kids change clothes (Some days they take off their clothes before outside time and spend the half hour running around in their underwear. I thought it was a bit odd the first time they did that, but whatever). Then the kids have a snack, we switch teachers, and I teach the same half-hour lesson to a different group of kids. Finally we switch back to our original class and teach a second lesson that usually ends up being only about 15 minutes. The whole thing takes only about two and a half hours, but it is quite tiring anyway.

The kids are often rowdy, but they are quite cute and most of them seem to like school and like us. Most of them can't really hold any sort of conversation in English (beyond "help me" and "I want that"), but a few are getting there. Often, the kids who are the rowdiest tend to speak the language the best, which I find interesting. I guess since they talk more, they get more practice speaking than the students who are too shy to talk at all.