Busy November 3

Here is an update on P's activities this month. This includes the school's talents day presentations and their orchestra performance at Gimpo Art Hall.

Talent's Day

Last Friday was set as the School's Talent's Day of sorts. Everyone was informed about it more than a month ago and given an enough time to prepare. Being our first time to attend such thing here, we were up for anything. P volunteered us to participate in the program. He wanted to play the violin with his Dad and I was going to do a storytelling. I had no problem with my task except that I needed to know how big the audience and location will be. It turned out to be only classroom level so preparation was quite easy. His father, on the other hand, first balked at the idea but had no choice when the teacher made a phone call to him a week before the D day.

When we got there, we noticed a few people selling mini-bouquets in front of the school. It seems that we were the only parents who will be participating in the program. Most parents were just simply there to watch their kids. Is that how it's supposed to be? I am not really very sure until now.

The first in the list was a duet of P and the MC singing the Do Re Mi song. We were pretty surprised to see that our son was brave enough to sing in front of his mates' parents. There were also some mini magic shows each from the boys and girls, a dance, playing a couple of musical instruments like ocarina, flute, recorder and hand bells, a couple of mini-gag show skits, taekwondo exhibition to the tune of Psy's "Gangnam Sytle" and a pantomime of Let It Go song. It was just hilarious to watch these kids presenting their show.

One thing that I noticed is there weren't a lot of singing and dancing. If it was in Ph, I'm sure we would have been bored with a lot of singing, and group dancing. It would be quite hard to have all the kids join in coz there were more students in each class than here, with 40 something versus 25-30 here at the most.

Another thing that I noticed was the use of technology during the presentation. Since each classroom has a big monitor connected to the teacher's desktop computer, all the teacher had to do is hold the remote control to change the slide, music and whatnots.

The rooms were pretty small just enough for the less-than 30 kids, so I was wondering how we will all fit. When we got there, we saw the desks piled up along the hallway and only the chairs were left at the back part of the room. The kids, themselves, had 3 mats to sit on in the middle. It was totally a different school culture for me.

I am just relieved that P is quite active and thriving at his Korean school now. We are not yet totally on board the academics part but I'm just glad that he doesn't hate schooling yet. I do hope that this enthusiasm will not wane on when he reaches higher level like middle or high school. It's where the tough student life here really begins, from what I've heard.

Note: I may have to write a short thank you letter to his homeroom teacher before the school year ends. He definitely played a great part on my son's easy adjustment to school life here. I'm sure he has cut a lot of slack on my son's behalf during this past year.

So that's it for now. Gimpo Stuff on the next post....

P's School this November 2014

We had another chance to drop by my son's school last week for the "Talent Show/Day" and these is what we saw on the exhibit area for fourth and fifth graders. It's where they put selected art works done usually during art period every week. I'm not sure though how often they change these but they are interesting outputs that the kids produce. It's like a year-long open house exhibit at the school.

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