I spent the latter part of last week and the start of this week substitute teaching at one of the largest schools in Phuket Town. My schedule consisted of Phonics lessons in six levels of Intensive English Programme (IEP) classes. Today, I was going over /-ose/ and /-one/ endings with my P4 students and they had to come up with phrases using some of the words with those sounds. My favorite was “a bone in a cone”. Others included “a rose on a nose” (also, “a nose on a rose”) and “a rose alone”. I also had the students draw images reflecting these phrases.

I have really enjoyed my four days at this school and the IEP kids are a breath of fresh air after my last two years of primarily teaching in the General English Programme (GEP) with the packed (60+ students each) classrooms and their minimal exposure to the language (one 50-minute lesson per week compared to the IEP’s three). I will not be working here tomorrow as I decided to share the fill-in assignment with a recently arrived friend from Russia. She will work at this school tomorrow and Thursday and I will return on Friday for the Christmas activity.

I spent my non-teaching hour in the afternoon making sure that all of the work the students did for me was properly marked and clearing the desk for the other teacher. I am looking forward to sleeping a bit later than 5:30 tomorrow morning!