Work Party and the Past Tense

This has been a fine week at work for me. I only went into work for three days. I only taught 8 classes. I had a work party at VIPS where I won a work event for a bottle of wine to take home by correctly guessing the top 5 wine producing countries. Take that Southern hemisphere, you aren't on the list. The buffet was nice, we went around 4 and stayed until about 6. We paid lunch prices and enjoyed some of the dinner menu, too. Talk about the best of both worlds.

I have continued trying to make certain portions of my class more communicative. It's not very successful at the moment as the children are still adjusting to being asked questions with no specific or obvious answer. I also find speak with your partner time turns into speak to your friend in Korean time. This is counter productive. Unfortunately the students would rather do something entirely different or complain in Korean that they are suffering the indignity of being requested to use English in English class to anyone other than the English teacher. Usually I do this in the form of a game if I want it to work. Unfortunately even this tactic won't work with the majority of grade 5 and 6 students.

As for my classes, the most interesting one was teaching the grade four and five students about the regular past tense. I taught them the 3 ways to say 'ed' endings. The grade five students understood voiced and voiceless sounds better and could determine when to use [t] and [d] and [id]. The grade four students couldn't master when to use [d] or [t]. Two voiceless sounds at the end of a word is tricky.
I also taught a grade 6 class. It was the same lesson last week that I talked about "We went there by bus." This time it was in present tense with 1st and 3rd person subjects. so went became go to or goes. This is also the class I chose to do the warm-up lesson plan for. The only thing is I taught that class before I finished my warm-up lesson plan. I filmed it and it will be nice to see the difference between my normal lesson plan and the overly planned lesson that I will teach to the other grade 6 classes next week. I only taught it to one out of five classes, so I will have plenty of opportunities to teach it next week and the week after. My schedule for grade 6 is quite hectic and some classes are several weeks ahead or behind others. I really hope I can notice a difference between the class I filmed first following my standard lesson plan where I really only think about activities and objects and subsequent classes that had the more thorough lesson plan. I don't know if I will be able to place any increased success on the better planning or simply on reflection and repetition that naturally occur when teaching the same lesson multiple times. Time will tell. I will put up both videos next week along with the micro-teaching in class and try to compare and reflect on all three.