More of Soo Min's May Project

The fifth graders are doing a play about Civil Rights, with props and all. There is a lot of arts and crafts in elementary school in general.

There is also another volunteer that I have been seeing daily. He comes in and helps kids read and learn multiplication tables. There also exists a big difference between the knowledge levels of students in ESOL in the same grade. Yesterday, I was helping the third graders do their math packet, and while some could do it with almost no help from me (save translations here and there and a few hints), I had to work with one girl for a significant time. (I still remember it. You earned $168 from selling cookies, some peanut butter and some chocolate chips. If you earned $75 from peanut butter cookies, how much money was earned from selling chocolate chips?)

I also go between teachers and deliver messages and figure things out. Today, I packaged some inter-school mails and dropped them off in the proper mailbox. I went around kindergarten classrooms for some Perell filings.

The girl that I helped out with making her Tae-Kwon-Do PowerPoint, she is going to present the PowerPoint at her summer school class and do a little demo. As for the other girl, I think that the PPT project is just what she was assigned to do in ESOL. (Initially, she wanted to do hers on SeaWorld.)

For some of the kids, they are here while their parents are staying in St. Louis for their jobs, their studies—whatever it may be. And once their parents are done, they will return to their country. This one girl will be returning to her country this July, after staying in the United States for around one year. It must be kind of weird, seeing that right at the moment when you have become a bit more familiar with the language, you have to go back. Also, as I have already mentioned, there exists a good amount of Koreans in ESOL. One negative aspect of that is that the students all speak in Korean to each other when they come to ESOL, and thus, they don’t really improve their English because they don’t speak it to each other. Some kids speak in Korean to me because they know I can understand it, even when I continue to speak in English to them. It really defeats the purpose of coming to ESOL to improve English.

Last Friday was the school’s Moving-Up Day, which is graduation day for the fifth graders. They are moving up to middle school. However, they have to come back to school for a week after they graduate and still go to classes. I don’t know how the teachers are going to make them concentrate, after seeing the senoritis (including myself) at Burroughs.

Kids come to ESOL during their reading time, I think. The kids have their Specials classes, in which they go to Arts, Music, or PE, depending on the day.