Soo Min's May Project

For my May Project, I am helping out at a program called English for Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL) at Ross Elementary. I began my May Project the Friday before last Friday. Since that day was the field day for the students, I only came in part-time and met the kids.

The teacher that I am helping (who is an ESOL teacher) is moving to a different room next year, so a good part of my work is organizing and cleaning up the room. (But it’s hard because kids come in and it becomes a mess again.) It is especially difficult to organize the books, because some are from the library, some are for the third grade, some are for the ESOL, etc. It is labeled in all different ways, so it’s really hard to tell how to organize it.

I also get to read with kids and play games with them. A lot of the kids are finishing their book project, which entails a summary, general information about the book (such as setting, characters, title, author, problem, and solution), and recommendation. The students are completing their book projects in a variety of ways: posters, boxes taped with colored construction paper, shoeboxes with drawings, PowerPoint, etc. I am helping them complete their projects, assisting them in getting the necessities down in English and going over their grammar.

I have also helped students with completing their PowerPoint projects. One student did it on Tae-Kwon-Do, a form of Korean martial arts, and another did hers on dolphins. They really didn’t know how to start it, so I made them an outline and helped them throughout the way.

At this moment, the fifth graders of put on a play (I think about Native Americans) and are performing it in the ESOL room.

Working at ESOL is particularly interesting because I get to see kids from all over the world. There is someone from Yemen, from Sierra Leone, from Korea, from India, from Japan, etc. There is this one kid that helps other kids out a lot. I think kids are generally very willing to help.

There are a lot of third-graders in ESOL this year. Apparently, around one-third of the third grade class attends ESOL, even if not all of them come every day. Since the ESOL room is located right next to the third grade classrooms, kids, I think, for the most part, come and go as they please. I was surprised about this, but it appears as though that is due to the fact that these are the last few weeks of school. During the year, the teacher told me that the ESOL does a lot of testing and less fun activities.

When the students have finished whatever they needed to do, they can play games with each other or use laptops to go to fun educational sites (like coolmath). I also saw one kid doing logic puzzles on computer. For the games they play, those are also pretty educational. They play games such as SET and 24 (You are given 4 numbers and you have to use addition, subtraction, multiplication, or division to make 24). There’s also a piano in the room, so one kid always comes in here to play some music.

For the first three-ish days, I spent my time making the backboard for the school’s variety show. It is a talent show, put on and MC-ed by the kids. It was a black backdrop, and I spent my time cutting out star shapes, printing out the children’s names (who were participating in the talent show), cutting out other shapes like butterflies, violins, musical notes, leaves, and apples—and then gluing everything onto the black-paper-covered backdrop. However, I did not have the chance to see the talent show because I was busy organizing books and shelving them in the library.

I’m doing a quite a bit of arts-and-crafts-like things here. After finishing the variety show backboard, I proceeded to make gifts for the school’s Ambassadors. Ambassadors are the students that volunteer to help the teachers. Thus, at the last day of school, they will be getting M&Ms as gifts. I went out and bought the chocolates, cut out oval-shaped yellow paper, printed out: “Thank you for being Marvelous & Magnificent!” and stapled the oval-shaped papers onto the M&Ms.

Last week, I also made table number cards for the school’s Trivia Night.

There are also a good amount of Korean kids in ESOL too. Since I can speak Korean, I also act as a translator in some situations. For example, the teacher did a reading test for two Korean kids today. Because the kids had difficulty expressing what they understood from the book in English, they explained it to me in Korean first, and then I explained to the teacher.

So, back to the organizing. We’re trashing, ripping, recycling old papers, binders, dead glue sticks, and all sort of things.

I’m assuming that the usual ESOL classes are a lot different from what they usually are.  Well, I like working here. It’s fun but really tiring. Kids have so much energy and sometimes, I feel like I’m less tired after a full school day using my brain. But the kids are mostly cute, I guess.