Images of My First Days at Schools

The images tell the story. The animated faces. The broad smiles. The looks of total puzzlement. The sheer pride.
Consider clicking on the pictures to enlarge them and then absorbing the full sensuality and ease of modern digital photography.


Here, in order, are pictures of students rehearsing for their Friday play (not in English), Parn working at the board with students on first = 1st, second = 2nd, etc., student teacher Q (Queen) working on the usages of "this" and "that" at the board, Aof writing on the white board (there were two white boards in my visits to four schools so far), TK with a supervisor, Parn working on phonics, Parn and Joy proudly posing, a student working on a picture of a bunny for vocabulary development, and TK with the principle of Ban Sanpranate School and my student friends from Payap.





This is the note I wrote to one of the students at our post observation critique: "Dear ------, It's always hard to walk into a class in the middle of the year and make intelligent comments. So, what I say here will have to be guesses, but perhaps educated guesses. So take my comments as suggestions and hunches only.

Your lesson seemed to be fun for the students after they got going on the competition to spell first, second, third, etc with the abbreviations 1st, 2nd, etc. But students may have had trouble piecing together the five parts the lesson broke down into (Reading "Oh my friend, I meet you today" together, reading the chart Phonics Fun, working on days of month 1st, 2nd, etc., playing the game/competition with writing 5th, 6th, 7th, etc., and finally the writing of the month competition).


How did the five pieces fit together? We learn languages to sort out and manage the complexities of our worlds. Meaning and a sense of our experiences are constructed when parts are combined to become wholes, and when these wholes give value to our lives. We learn language to organize and manage our lives, not for proficiency in language alone. So, phonics and vocabulary and simple sentences combine to turn into greater competencies. What we might call parts education (learning vocabulary, learning grammatical concepts, learning the difference between this and that) gains value, and student interest, when students see that the parts taken together make us stronger communicators and better adapters to our environment."
A final note: Check out our Thai blog on English Camp; it comes from the same school as the one in this entry.