Special children...

Today I started teaching the Kindergarten and Special Needs Class (children with learning disabilities). I had no idea what to expect, since I've never taught such young children before.

To back track quickly, there's a little boy in 3rd grade (who I don't teach) who is SO cute. He always greets me and this morning, he saw me as I was walking to school and he wanted to hold my hand while he walked. >
Here he is on the right:


I arrived at my Kindergarten class a few minutes early to chat with the Kinder..teacher. Before I even walked into the class, the kids were hugging me, stroking my arms, poking me, inspecting my bindi and just being plain adorable! I introduced myself and had them each say... "My name is..." I didn't really have anything solid in mind to teach them, cause I wanted to first see the level they were at.

They didn't know parts of the body, so I taught them "eyes/ears/nose/mouth etc..." Their Kinder teacher and I couldn't believe that they had already memorized about 10 body parts in 10 minutes. I'll teach this again next week...

Here's the Kindergarten class:

After that, I had my first class with the students with learning disabilities. There were only 5 students today, 3 of which are in my regular English classes, so they are familiar with me by now. I did the same thing as with the Kinder's... intro'd myself and taught them parts of the body (very basic).

It came as a surprise to me when the teacher told me that the children want me to give them English names. First I said no, because their Korean names are beautiful, but they still wanted it.... I didn't want to name them with generic names. Because I think they are so special, I wanted to give them names of people that are very close to me.

So...introducing my extra special students:

Jay Jay

Barry

Trudy

Sylvia

Damage (Darmesh would have been too difficult) and this guy seems cool just like my bro ;)

Unlike most days, where I feel drained after back to back classes, today I felt really good. I think it's because I felt like I made a tiny difference to a few children today. The fact that they could differentiate various parts of their body within minutes was great! And as for the Special Needs class, I'm grateful that it's small so that I can give individual attention to the children.


On another note... I am learning Hangeul (Korean).