Demo's, kids and ipod

Well its been an interesting few days. Training is very intensive, starting at 8:30am and finishing at 6pm but we can both honestly say that we have learnt more in these past 4 days than over the last few years:) Its really fun though and the people we are meeting have all been great.

Now let me tell you about the demos we had to prepare. We basically got taught the entire curriculum for kindy (kindergarten) in two days and then had to act out a section of the lesson to our group and an assessor. Now anyone who has ever taught children will know that this is not an easy task of simply getting up infront of the class and expecting everyone to read words off the board...these are 4-5 year old kids we are talking about. So we are basically the local entertainers (or clowns if you like) who at the same time have to teach the ABC's, phonics, sentence patterns, vocabulary, songs, math, etc...I don't even think I was ever taught half this stuff at school;).

But its oh so much fun..and everyone is talking to each other like they are 5 year old kids! For example, if Emlyn does something I'll be like, "thats awesome Emlyn, you are so clever!". Oh and DO NOT forget the American accent. So funny!

Another thing we keep doing now is randomly singing children songs! For instance, "there are ten in the bed and the little one said, 'roll over, roll over'". Its also recommended we put these tunes on our ipods since we need to know them off-by-heart. Speaking about ipods...I am the proud owner of a new ipod nano 8GB! This is Taiwan after all and even though this is an American product, still managed to make a nice saving compared to SA...whats new!

OK the last thing that has to be mentioned and had the whole training group rolling on the ground with laughter and shear joy, was our introduction to actual, live Kindy kids. There is a kindy a few floors down in the building we are training in and their teacher brought them up to sing songs for us. Oh so cute and we finally got to see who we would actually be teaching (so also slightly scary). Asian children are definitely cute and the best part was when they started singing! Lets just say very LOUD (screaming at the top of their lungs) and doing the funniest actions to the words:). Then as a reward we got to hand out candy to the children but they had to ask us, "may i please have some candy" which is impressive for a 5 year old surrounded by giant foreign people! The best part was that mostly all the kids only took one sweet! Even when offered another one they declined...'high five' for the manners these kids have! Its going to be an interesting year!