first double class day...

I am so blessed to be able to work with the Karen community.

Today was the first Saturday of our new double class schedule. The beginners met at 9am. We studied the family and learned about my family tree. This seemed to be very successful. The class was spirited and lively with the beginners feeling at ease without many of the advanced students present. Then at 10am the intermediate/advanced students met. We devoted most of the time to the vocabulary in the first practice test for the DMV. Then we discussed the stories that the students are writing. They were pleased with the reformatted stories and most will continue their writing. The stories are very interesting and I will put them together in a booklet for our last class.

After class I joined the students in eating sticky rice and crispy chicken wings. As I was leaving, the group started their choir practice. What a wonderful day!

blognote: Next week Kari Miller, our Director of Music, will be the guest presenter.

Pastor John's class

Today Pastor John Endler was our guest presenter. He is very familiar with the Karen community so this was a great opportunity to get to know them even better.

Pastor John worked on story telling using the Bible and continued the grammar work on the past tense stressing the differences between the regular and irregular forms. The verbs in English will take many lessons as this is a difficult area for second language learners.

schedule change...

Classes have been going well on Saturdays. We are averaging 18 students. But they feel they want to change the format. Originally the students wanted one class with varying levels. The beginner students now feel the need for a class of their own. So we will offer two classes on Saturday mornings: a 9 o'clock for beginners and a 10 o'clock for advanced learners. The beginning class will focus on oral skills and the advanced class can do more reading and writing. Even though this is a lot more planning on my part, it will better meet the needs of the Karen community. The guest teacher classes will remain at 10. These classes focus on a theme that can be interesting and useful to the entire group.