English Easy Go is a county wide English competition, mainly for 5th graders but you can pick the best English speakers in the school I think. There are all kinds of categories, but all schools with an ETA have to compete in at least either the Reader's Theater or the Song and Dance competitions. The schools either compete with small, medium or large schools. So I had Shun An competing in Reader's Theater in the medium school group and Dong Shin competing in Song and Dance in the small school group. And as one of my LETs told me, "English Easy Go is not easy. It should be called English Hard Go. And every year, the teachers get mad at the students because they do not take it seriously." I don't think I ever saw my co-teachers really get that mad at the students though...I guess there's a first for everything!
Shun An held practices twice a week starting in about mid-March and moved up to four times a week in May during the 40 minute period after lunch. I guess technically it's considered rest time, but I've only seen about one person resting during it, otherwise the students are running around doing I'm not really sure what or having orchestra practice or cleaning the school or countless other activities and the teachers are generally all just working. Anyway, I know The True Story of the Three Little Pigs like the back of my hand...better even. I know exactly how each kid says each phrase and we all breathed a collective sigh of relief when, at the competition, James successfully said, "So of course, the minute he knocked on the door it fell down" as opposed to, "So of course, the minute he knocked on the door, he fell down" which was what had been happening every day in practice.
Dong Shin chose to participate in the song and dance category because the night before English Easy Go they had a big school wide performance night and the fifth graders were going to put on the play Cinderella in English. So my task was to find an English pop song that had some sort of Cinderella theme. Instead I thought to myself, "What song could I listen to multiple times a day for a month or two and not get sick of?" Call Me Maybe was the obvious choice. So with a little help from my roommate, Kenton, I rewrote the lyrics of Call Me Maybe to be about Cinderella...sort of. Fortunately, the students really liked the catchy tune and worked really hard at learning it. But after they learned it we kind of stopped practicing it and devoted the time to the practicing for the play, so actually Siena ended up making up the dance and teaching it to them the Monday and Tuesday before English Easy Go...so since I go to Shun An those days of the week I didn't really help much with that. Most of the boys were playing girls parts (hence all the wigs). At English Easy Go we added a little bit of the play to the beginning and end of the dance so it would meet the five minute minimum time.
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| Here is the whole class. That's Cinderella in the skirt. |
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| Here we have Cinderella looking for a taxi to take her to the ball. |
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zy1Dz1jBVC8
It was easier to understand in person (and probably also due to the fact that I wrote the lyrics...) but anyway I was really proud of them for how hard they worked and how much they improved (and their great attitudes about the whole thing). Also for singing just with music. I know a couple of schools had their students singing with the actual recording which was obviously way easier.
Then at English Easy Go all the ETAs had to work at stations for all the students to come through to practice English. We were told to spend about 30 seconds or so on each student to have a mini dialogue with them. My group decided on a restaurant theme since we knew the school where English Easy Go was being held at had a lot of fake food we could use. So for about 3.5 hours we gave student after student a little menu and asked what they wanted to eat. We got little breaks to go watch out own students perform and then came back to the station. Good times.
Just today, we had a little party at Dong Shin to celebrate English Easy Go. And like anything else with that class it was very fun and more eventful that I expected. There were 3 kinds of cake (black tea, lime, and peach), sweet potato chips and milk for the students (I stuck with my tea). Everyone was happy and excited. Of course we couldn't get through the whole party without incident so I shouldn't have been that surprised when Nick sneezed (or coughed? I'm not really sure) with a mouth full of water and incidentally sprayed water all over poor little Kitty, who sits next to him. Considering her whole right side, desk and cake were covered with water from his mouth, she handled it very well. Oh 502, the excitement never stops.
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