Five for Friday time!

TGIF!!  It’s Friday, so it’s time to link up with Doodle Bugs Teaching for the weekly Five for Friday.

Can I get a big woo-hoo?  WOO-HOO!!!!

Here are my five random things from this week:

If you guessed “As Long As You Love Me” by the Backstreet Boys, you are the winner!

My co-teacher for my 5th and 6th grade winter camp class wanted to teach the students this song.  She asked me if I knew it.  Hah!  I started singing it to her and then whipped out my iPod and started playing the song.  Gotta love the Backstreet Boys.  We had fun singing and teaching the kids this song.  I don’t think they liked it near as much as we did.

One day this week my co-teacher surprised me and asked me to go with her and her winter camp class to a little coffee shop.  It was actually a coffee shop that is run by intellectually disabled students from the school next to ours.  Pretty cool, huh?  The kids loved it.

One of our goals in English class is to get our students to practice speaking.  On the whole, Koreans don’t think they speak English well, even if they do.  So they are not likely to answer a question if you ask the whole class.  So I brought in a game.  I had been using Hot Potato with my elementary classes and thought I would use the same game with my older class.  (The boy in orange is the son of one of the teachers at my school, and he sent him to school this week to practice his English.  He was wonderful!)

So what I did is this…I brought my iPod and little speaker from home and put on my “Workout” playlist.  I played the music, and we passed the “hot potato” from person to person.  When the music stopped (by me pressing the pause button), the person holding the “hot potato” would have to pick a tongue twister from the box and read it.  We had learned tongue twisters the day before.  They.  Loved.  It.  And it totally surprised my co-teacher.  We all laughed and had such a good time.  Playing Hot Potato has been been one of the best experiences at my school.  Who would have known?

On Wednesday morning, we took the elementary kiddos on a field trip to O World to go sledding.  Down an artificial snow hill.  Actually, it was tubing….aka putting your booty into a tiny inner tube.  And what do you know?  It started snowing before we left.  Cool!

This place was so cool.  It’s an amusement park and zoo.  I would love to come back in the spring.

We had to walk through the park to get to the snow hill.  We each had a student buddy who is blind.

 These “stairs” were somewhat difficult for the blind students.  They weren’t even at all.  And you had to step over this awkward rubber.  Then you got your inner tube and drug it up the hill.

 It was SO MUCH FUN!  I went up and down the hill 9 times.  I felt like a little kid.

The last random thing of the week is a doozy.  The principals took all the winter camp teachers out to dinner today after school.

This was our appetizer.  Silk worm larvae.  Yes.  You read that right.  And it smells JUST as bad as you think it does.  It’s awful.  Simply awful.

Sorry for the pic.  I just had my phone.

Then for the main dish…we had a spicy array of sea creatures: octopus, shrimp, crab, mussels, squid…all mixed with bean sprouts.

And here is a little baby octopus.  He says “hi”.

Makes you want to move to Korea, right?

Seriously though…as I was sitting on the floor in the restaurant, I thought about what an incredible experience I’m having over here.  Crazy and sometimes strange but incredible.