At the Core of Every Child....

...Is a Nuclear Reactor! Or so I have come to believe after witnessing another example of my student's unlimited energy. I don't understand how I can run for over an hour no problem but just watching my grade 3/4 split is tiring. For this to happen on a Friday is no great tragedy because I can be home from badminton by 10:05PM and in bed soon after. Class started easily enough, easing into a listening activity whereby I explained the days of the week and what I did on each. Grasping ficton to make my real life more intestering, things became slightly absurd, such as, I go dinosaurs hunting on Sundays. Beforehand I stressed that it was a listening excerise and moved topic to topic quickly so as to leave them no chance to comment on tangential points (which, to their curious minds, can always be found). After class the homeroom teacher and I agreed the exercise was well executed to their exact English level (or rather just slightly above it) and thus was challenging enough and engaging enough to be called a success. From there things revved up. I'm not sure why, but their after the action du jer became to jump up on certain words. A pattern to the trigger could not be discovered. They were doing their work so we let it slide thinking they would eventually tire themselves out. Just take a look around where you are reading this right now and imagine if, for whatever reason, on every 7th word or so you and your co-workers or co-habitants, jumped up. Wouldn't that make you tired? After all the jumping up, we moved to the next activity on the lesson plan: an activity about the days of the month in the gym. In a cloud of excited noise and bubbling voices we made our way to the gym where the months of the year had been carefully posted on the walls. We preceeded to ask them questions where the point was to charge as a group the the answer. But they would just keep running, and running, and running. By lunch, my only saving grace - and much in keeping with my students' sense of homour - was pinned on Super-Curry-and-Rice-Power.