My Learning Jungle!: First Week Teaching

Hello Everyone,
Sorry for the long overdue post, last week was incredibly hectic being the first week of school. I originally started out with 16 students but that has now changed to 19 and I am sure as time continues I will get more. The entire week of teaching was incredibly challenging as I was learning the levels of the students and the cultural differences within the school system. Since then I have grown accustomed to those changes and am finding teaching to be a lot less stressful (although still mildly chaotic!). The greatest challenge of all is the range of my students, those who came from the Learning Jungle Kindergarten are very fluent in oral English however there are some that know little to none. I am practically teaching three separate classes in order to accommodate each level of needs, those who speak not a word of english, those who speak it but are not able to work without constant assistance, and those who sore through every possible task. Also as per Cambodian culture parents start their children in school a lot sooner so many of my students are four or five years old with very little attention spans, so lots of brain breaks and songs have come in handy. To spare you most of the boring details here is a quick recap of week one teaching....
Day one: Somewhat chaotic but seems to be going well until a child projectile vomits in the classroom leaving the others screaming bloody mary.....
Day two: a new student arrives, speaks no English and he is a runner and likes to take off out the door whenever he sees fit....
Day three: a Holiday (part the clouds and key the rays of sun as my saving grace!)
Day four: in comes the behaviour chart and things begin to calm down as students realize I mean business. The runner obviously does not understand this and continues to disappear.
Day five: the filming of our school commercial..... I'll go into detail on this one

Well the whole idea of filming was interesting for the kids for all of ten minutes and then the majority of students lost interest. I had pulled out every tactic I had to keep their attention but that just wasn't enough. So instead they resorted to only selecting some of the kids for each scene while the other kids had to be corralled elsewhere so as not to disrupt production. We filmed in the classroom, and on the field, the computer room, and music room, AND then the dreaded pool where I had to then pretend to teach students to swim..... considering I almost drowned at a young age while in a swimming class I was in no shape to teach these kids how to swim! The minute the kids got in the poor I regretted agreeing to this deed as the kids whipped water in my face temporarily blinding me as I searched for my contact, then as i bent over to check my eye they decided I would be the perfect jungle gym. It should be interesting to see the film footage thats for sure.

Day one I had prepared a bunch of homemade play dough for the kids. I had added food colouring to the centre and before playing with it we read... Magic Play Dough oh so white, I make this wish with all my might, that if another colour does appear, we are sure to have a great school year!