‘Oku ou faiako

I am a teacher. This week I had the opportunity to teach four classes in my local primary school. The idea was to gain some experience lesson planning and being in front of a class of Tongan kids, so that we have something to draw from when we go out to our sites.

I was hoping to regale you with stories and funny anecdotes about class and the kids, but unfortunately the kids did not acquiesce to this plan. A ten-year-old girl winked at me. The kids in class 3 gave me a necklace of flowers before I taught their class. Yet, besides these brief moments, the class was pretty tame which is why I have a funnier post accompanying this one, and will mostly just discuss what happened in one my classes this week.

In four days I taught 4 classes, class 6, class 3, and class 5 twice. The grades are roughly equivalent to 5^th grade, 2^nd grade, and 4^th grade respectively. The experience was pretty fun overall, and it was nice to finally get up in front of the kids and see if I am at all qualified to teach them English. There were some bumps in the road, but it went pretty well for the most part and I feel like I was successful.

I won’t go into the details of all my classes, but my best class by far was when I taught class 3 by myself. My first Tongan friend and frequent blog subject, Hausia, is in the class so she definitely helped me by answering my questions and making sure everyone paid attention.

My assignment was to teach punctuation to class 3, so my focus was to have them learn, recognize, and repeat, in English, periods, exclamation points, question marks, commas and apostrophes. I separated my teaching in 3 tiers.

First, I wrote down all the punctuation marks into the phrase “Chicka Chicka Boom Boom,” which is part of a popular kids book. For the apostrophe I changed the Chicka to Chi’a, and I added hand signals to all of the punctuation marks, so that their learning was simultaneously auditory, visual, and kinesthetic. I taught the kids how to say each phrase with the particular hand motion that accompanied the punctuation mark. They slowly started to get it, and it was really fun to watch 20 8 year olds yelling Chicka Chicka Boom Boom with my hand motions.

After they got the hang of this, I upgraded to simple sentences like, “I like the dog. Do you like the dog? I love the dog!” The students would repeat the sentences after I said them, while still using the correct hand motions. Every so often I would stop and ask, “What is this?” pointing to a punctuation mark to see if they could tell me which one it was. By this point they were slowly getting it.

My next strategy was to read a kids book to them about a mouse, a strawberry, and a hungry bear. I forget the exact title but it was simple and had a lot of punctuation so it was perfect for the class. I made all the kids get out of their desks and sit by me on the floor while I read the story. As I read from the book, the kids and I would use the hand motions when they appeared in the story.

I then read the book a second time, but this time I would stop, point to a punctuation mark, and ask, “What is this?” By this point they totally got it, and I definitely felt a strange sense of pride hearing all these Tongan kids shout out together, “Exclamation point! Apostrophe!” I was really happy because the kids had fun and they learned what they were supposed to, so I felt like I had accomplished my goal for the day.

I apologize if this bored you to tears, but this will be the majority of my life for the next two years – lesson planning, teaching primary school kids, and teacher development – and I wanted to talk about my first experience teaching kids in Tonga. The lesson planning is tedious, but being in front of the class is awesome, and I love how excited the class was to have me teach them and I feel a kind of odd sense of accomplishment.

So far teaching has been a success, and I only hope I continue to feel this way as I officially begin my occupation as primary school teacher in Tonga.

The concert in Fotuma