Co-co-teaching

"Do you know who this is?"

Thirty-five pairs of expectant eyes train on me, not quite sure enough of themselves to answer. Finally, one girl raises her hand. "Your mom?"

Yes! My kids were beside themselves with excitement at meeting Teacher Bekah's mom, and began lobbing questions at her about herself (what do you like to do?), her school (what do kids in America eat for lunch?), etc. Which worked out wonderfully, giving me time to write the day's vocabulary words on the board.

With my mom, an experienced teacher, here for the week, we now routinely have three or four teachers in a classroom, between myself, my co-teacher, my mom, and the home room teacher who is often sitting at her desk at the back. But with the lesson plan we've cooked up, it's just about perfect.

We're teaching Christmas decorations! My mom, who is a 4th grade teacher back home, recently did an exercise with her students in which they decorated a cut-out paper ornament and then had to write descriptively about their creations; next, she read each description aloud and students had to guess which was which. I thought it sounded fun and easy--with some tweaking to accommodate my students' non-native command of English--and it has been.

The only problem really, is that the kids love the decorating so much that it's a struggle to make it to the writing bit (you know, the part that redeems this as an English lesson, not an arts class...), and we have not made it to the guessing bit a single time.

What we did get, over and over again, was a bunch of glitter, strewn from ornaments onto the overflow paper, surrounding table space, floor, and, of course, ourselves, lending a permanent sheen to our classes. It took all of us working together from keeping a single class from running through our entire glitter stock.

Just a few of our ornaments, drying on my desk

Find the mistaken word! And then give a collective "awwwww"

 But, despite or, more likely, because of that, my students LOVE my mom, and the wonderful goodies she brought for them to enjoy. And I do too.