Hospitable hospitals

I was marking some of the grade nine boys’ Islamic studies end-of-year exam papers this morning. Some of the answers they gave were simply priceless.
Grade nine means that they’re about 14-15 years old. Also, some of them are learning English as a second language.
Warning: Do not let your stay exceed three days!

What is the right [...]

I shouldn’t laugh but…

I think I mentioned before that I teach 6-7 year old boys in an international school.
An integral part of the English program is the weekly spelling test. The words selected for the tests are mostly words that are spelt phonetically (i.e. they are spelt like they sound). This way it also serves to help their [...]

The Next Generation of Literalists.

This blog is rapidly turning into a compilation of school happenings but children do say a lot of amusing things, so I guess I could live with it if it did go that way.
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I’d just finished teaching my lesson and bent down to pick up my bag and said “OK guys, I’m off now!”
One of [...]

Learning the classics

“Teacher, do you know Latin?” my seven year old student asked me expectantly.
I thought, mā shā’ Allāh, his parents must have told him that the English language has roots in other languages.
“Yes, a lot of English words come from it.”
I said yes in the sense that I know of it, rather than I can actually [...]

Sounds the same

When you teach small children how to read it’s very important that they learn the phonetic sound that a letter makes even more so than the actual letter name. Once they’ve mastered recognising the letter sounds you can move onto letter blends (two or more letters combined together into one sound), along with recognising some [...]

Infant communication

I teach very young Saudi kids English. Which is a momentously difficult task when you consider that my Arabic is extremely limited and their English upon arrival is even less than my Arabic.
So each class is normally filled with a lot of Monty Python type exaggerated dancing and jumping motions as I try to convey [...]