Personnel Changes

Yesterday we had a couple of announcements regarding personnel changes here at the school. Teacher David will assume the role of Head Foreign Teacher for our Sanxia school, and Teacher RIchi will enter training to become the Head Foreign Teacher at our Yingge school, which is currently scheduled to open next semester. Both of them have excellent teaching skills and I believe they will be excellent in their new roles.

As for me (Teacher Jonathan), I will assume a new role where I am in charge of recruiting for all three schools (Sanxia, Yingge and Banqiao). I am very excited about this new position, as I feel it will give me a chance to put my computer skills to good use, and it also gives me a chance to work and interact with a lot of different people. I will still be teaching as well, which is great. Although I only started teaching my K1 Lions class this semester, I must admit I’ve already grown quite attached to them. I’m happy I’ll still see them every morning.

Uncle Sam American School - The Zoo!

Periodically we take the students on outings to various places, and one great place to take them is the zoo. Kids always enjoy seeing different animals, and the Taipei Zoo is an excellent facility with a wide variety of different creatures to see.

Of course, it's an excellent opportunity for the students, as many of them see pictures of various animals in school, but never get to to see the animals in person.

Uncle Sam American School - Art Class - Ushering In a New Generation of Creative Minds

Shh! Creative minds at work.

Even Michaelangelo had to start somewhere!

Teaching at Uncle Sam is about more than just teaching English. We teach everything from Science to Phys. Ed.; we even teach personal hygiene. On Wednesday afternoon, I taught art to a group of K1 students.

For last week's lesson, half of it was already finished by another foreign teacher. For the first part of the lesson, they each had to color their own elephant. For my class (part two), they now had to take small pieces of colored paper and glue them on top of the picture.

This lesson worked very well for the tiny students, most of whom are only about three years old. Despite their limited fine motor skills, they all seemed to manage very well in getting most of the small papers on the picture and not so many on the floor.

One thing that amazes me is the care and concentration some students give to their work. As if every tiny paper has a very specific place that it needs to go. Also I find it interesting that there seems to be a wide discrepancy regarding how much glue is needed. Some students use the glue very sparingly, while others saturate the whole picture with glue before they even pick up their first piece of paper.

This week's project is an origami. I think I'll need to assist them with that one, but it should be fun.