The End of Orienation

It’s been a great two weeks in KL. We’re finishing up orientation on Monday, and Tuesday we are all heading to our respective states. One step closer to getting to our schools and meeting the kids. Since the last post not too much has changed. We still have a lot of sessions everyday, but this week they focused more on resources available to us in the classroom as well as strategies for teaching English as a foreign language (TEFL). On Wednesday we took a day trip out to the jungle. We went on an hour hike which lead us to a waterfall. It was great to get out of the city for the day and see more of the nature that Malaysia has to offer. Unfortunately we didn’t get a glimpse of too much wildlife, but I assume they heard 100 of us trekking through the jungle and decided to wander off for a bit.

On Saturday we hosted our first English camps at nearby school. It was one of the most fun days so far in my opinion. There were 10 of us working with about 100 students, with the help of some teachers. Our theme was American cities and we had four stations set up that the kids rotated through. One was Los Angeles, and the activity was creating a movie idea and presenting it to the ETAs/ ‘Hollywood Movie Directors’. Another city was New York, and that was Broadway themed which had the kids learning and performing dance moves. Atlanta was also one our cities, and at that station the kids wrote and performed raps as well as beat-boxed. Surprisingly, there were several extremely talented beat-boxers. The final activity, which I was in charge of with another ETA named Matt, was American football in the city of Boston. We taught them some of the vocabulary associated with the game, and then had a distance throw and punt kick competition. They seemed to really enjoy all of the activities and their English was better than anticipated. After we gave out prizes and thanked the teachers and the principal, we ended up taking photos with the kids for about thirty minutes. The kids are obsessed with selfies! I’ve had to create a separate facebook account: Cikgu Matt, which means teacher in Bahasa Malay, and I have already received a ton of requests from those students.