Flat Stanley comes to Korea!

For those of you who don't know already, I teach at 3 schools here in Korea. My base school is a technical high school where I am at 3 days a week. I also visit an elementary school and academic high school one day each a week. At the elementary school I teach small classes of very energetic 3rd, 4th, 5th and 6th graders.  My elementary school is an unique situation because 6 of my 28 students already speak English - most lived in the USA or New Zealand and one girl attended an English medium Christian school here in Korea. This presented me with a bit of a challenge - the lessons in the book are too easy for these native or near native English speaking students while their classmates are at a lower language comprehension level and are understandably shy in class. I am also required to use a textbook in each class which makes things a bit more complicated because all the directions are in Korean and the English is, at times, awkward at best for a native speaker. Thankfully I am permitted to detour from the books on occasion and so I decided to do the Flat Stanley project with my students. If you're not familiar with Flat Stanley click here to read a little background.
In class last week we briefly reviewed the story of Stanley Lambchop and the Flat Stanley project and before each student wrote a letter to a host family for Stanley (gracious friends and family who volunteered to help out) and then colored his or her own paper doll. Though I'm not quite sure if all the students understand that their Stanley dolls will return to Korea with pictures and a letter of his/her adventure I think they will be excited to see all the places Stanley has visited and realize that they can communicate in English. Click here or on the Flat Stanley tab above to see pictures from our project. I'll update the page as we receive letters back and will upload a map showing all the places around the world Stanley visited.

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