XiaDa you er yuan (Xiada Kindergarden)

Before I get to today's post -- just want to highlight some comments recently posted. Many of you have read Malinda's blog, Xiamen Adventure, or have heard me refer to it. She was a Fulbright scholar here last year and lived in this apartment with her 2 little girls. Her mother has posted a comment to update about her health -- she has had emergency brain surgery back in Texas due to an infection, and is now recovering. Please keep her and her family in your thoughts and prayers -- hopefully her mom will keep us updated.

It was actually Malinda who turned me on to the idea of offering to teach English at Helen's kindergarten -- which has led to my new Xiamen "career" as an after school English teacher and great fame among the 5 and 6 year olds on campus. I have been visiting Helen's class every week. Today I brought my camera. Helen and her classmates were each told to make a bird out of household items for the tree in the classroom -- Helen's is the one covered in aluminum foil, pictured below.



When I arrive each week, the children are having their mid morning "milk drink," which is hot soy milk, in little tin cups, which they each wash out. Helen is sitting between her 2 best friends, Rouen, whom you know from previous entries and another girl (in profile) whose name we both have trouble with, but who rides the bus with Helen in the morning, along with her twin brother, who is one of my English star students -- he knows all the animals, body parts and other vocabulary I have been teaching the class.



Today we learned body parts and sang that great American classic -- "Head, shoulders, knees and feet" along with our favorite -- "When you're happy and you know it"



I always bring my turtle puppet along to say hello and greet them individually.

Here is the class -- there are about 32 students, but everything runs very orderly, thanks to the teachers. Cai laoshi (Teacher Cai) showed me the projects they are working on, a mural of Xiamen and a unit on the foods special to Xiamen (lots of seafood dishes) and they are learning to read the names of common foods. Maybe I should be sticking around to learn more Chinese. She also told me about the school's web site, which I am adding to the links above --there are photos posted on the site -- you have to click around a bout to get past all the words -- Helen was not in any of the recent pictures, but they are cute and show what an active school it is.

Hopefully Helen will make some progress on the Chinese comprehension -- this 6 week point is a hard one -- she is getting a little impatient with not understanding -- and a little hard to motivate to do homework in the evenings to keep up with 1st grade. I am taking a relaxed approach with her on both fronts, but maybe we will get a tutor for her (and Thomas needs some help, too -- his 1st Mandarin test is coming up and the teacher has put me on notice that he is having some trouble memorizing characters).

We leave for Seoul tomorrow morning. Michael will give a paper at an American Studies conference and the rest of us will sight-see. On Saturday morning we will meet up with our friend Jaeyoon, aka Alvin, who used to live with us in the US for 2 years while he finished high school. We haven't seen him for a year and a half, because he has been back in Korea completing his military service, but we are really looking forward to seeing him. Helen especially, considers him her brother, since he was with us from as far back as she can remember (when she was ages 2-4). We will also see his family and take a whirlwind tour of Seoul. I know very little about Korean culture so it should be interesting...hoping to keep up the blog but not sure what the set up will be for the internet so we'll update when we get back.