Pancakes on Pancakes

Because today was super, have a listen to a song named "Good" or "I like it/Okay": Joah by Jay Park.

Today was activity day at Connexus, and it was cooking week, so we made pancakes with all of our classes. It was quite the undertaking, and towards the afternoon my small classroom was getting pretty roasty toasty, but it was still very fun. I think my favorite group were actually the Phonics groups,  starting with Phonics 1. The three little girls were just so delighted to be making pancakes at English school and were giggling at everything. It was also more just focused on having fun, because there wasn't a whole lot of English instruction to do besides teaching vocab. So I taught them the names of all the ingredients, but mostly we just had fun being together.

In Phonics 2, only the girls came, so again it was an all-girl class, which they LOVED. "Teacher, Dongwoo not come today....Haram not come?" "Yes, today it's only girls!" "Teacher YESSS!" and then giggles and squeals galore. Conversation time went like this:
"Sungyeon, how are you today?"
"I'm...excited..because today...GIRLS!"
"Can you ask Hyesu?"
"Hyesu how are you?"
"I'm excited because today GIRLS!"
Needless to say, they were pretty pumped.

The only downside to the day was that in my last class, the Blue 6 class that I love, there was an argument between two of the boys. I didn't know what about, but I could understand enough Korean to figure that the older of the two was upset about the way the younger boy was talking to him. It turns out it was over who got to eat more pancakes, which is totally dumb, but they had a meeting with our office fairy Minji who used her restorative discipline skills to get to the bottom of it. We might have a follow up on Monday about it, but I think everything was ok.

That might seem like a really dumb thing to address, a little fight over pancakes, but those things build up, and the learning atmosphere really is better when the students are friends, and aren't secretly annoyed or having chips on their shoulder or something. So, it's important to pay attention even to the little problems. It's a new way of thinking for me, because it was something that would have been impossible to do at the LIU afterschool because of lack of staff and training for it, but I can really see the value in it.

Well, that's all for now! I'm a little early on my blog writing this time, so enjoy!