Sharing Time

The students shuffle into the classroom- there is a flurry of activity. In theory, Exercise Time flows gracefully into Sharing Time, which launches cheerfully into Breakfast Time which leaps happily into English Time. We have only 15 minutes in which to have Sharing Time, but unfortunately students also must use this time to do a multitude of other activities.
First, there are a great many students who are sweaty after exercise time and they must change their shirts. I don't recall ever having done this in school when I was a child. Perhaps I did. All I know is, in Taiwan, if a kid gets sweaty (which they often do in the humidity and heat) that shirt is getting changed. I once changed one child 4 times in one day.
So there are at least 10 children getting their shirts changed, with varying degrees of independence. This means more work for my long-suffering Taiwanese co-teacher. Again, she's a saint and a savior all rolled in to one.
Also, the sweaty kids need their hair dried. This is another thing I never remember doing in America, but in Taiwan, every classroom is equipped with a hair-dryer, and every sweaty little head gets dried. It makes for interesting voice-inflection when teaching:
“Good Morning Monkey Class! Let's (blow dryer goes on) TALK ABOUT THE WEATHER TODAY! WHO WANTS TO GO (blow dryer off) to the window and tell us what the (blow dryer on) WEATHER LOOKS LIKE?!?”
There is also the on-going activity of water/tea drinking, nose wiping, back pack unloading and bathroom-going. Occasionally, there's some vomit, urine or blood.

Sharing time is a time when you talk about the weather, the date and days of the week and months of the year, greetings, and every month there's a new 'conversation' to learn. I often skipped the conversation (bad teacher!) because I thought they were lame. Also Hess had prescribed songs to go with different activities, but often I didn't like their songs and rather than fiddling with a cd player I'd just have them sing songs that I remembered from my childhood.
For the most part I tried to stick to the Hess curriculum but sharing time is the time where I would cheat a little. Instead of doing the prescribed conversation from the teachers guide, I would let students have 'free talk'. I feel that this is an area sadly lacking in Hess curriculum. I think students need time to try to talk and find their words and express themselves in English- in a natural and original way. I can see why Hess doesn't leave more time for this- It is easy for things to get off topic and out of control. But I really felt it was worthwhile. I saw myself as hopefully combating a wide-spread problem I'd witnessed in Taiwan- Students with a very strong grasp of grammar, reading, and writing, but very poor speaking skills. Even worse- students who can parrot anything you say, but can't come up with an original sentence to save their damn lives.
“Free-talk” went kind of like this. I would pick a student who was sitting nicely and invite him or her to come up to the front of the room. Usually they opted to sit on my lap. Then I would ask them a series of questions- Some Hess curriculum questions and then some non-Hess curriculum questions that would require that they put together their English knowledge and try to figure out what I was getting at.
“Hi Harrison,” I'd say, usually disguising my voice to make it interesting, “How do you feel?” (Hess question)
“I feel happy,” says Harrison. Then Harrison would sit completely still, waiting. He knew what was coming.
I'd bounce him like crazy on my knees while tickling him and repeat, “Oh, you feel happy, that's so great!” in my best sort of Oscar the Grouch voice.
Then, “Harrison, what day is today?” (Hess question)
“Today is Monday,”
Bounce bounce bounce. All of the other students would be laughing like crazy.
Then, “Harrison, what did you do yesterday?” (non-Hess question)
Harrison might have to sit and think about this for a moment. Maybe the other students would start calling things out. Or I would whisper in their ears “Did you see Mommy and Daddy?”
“Yes I see Mommy and Daddy,”
I would whisper, “You saw Mommy and Daddy?”
and he'd say, “Yes, I saw Mommy and Daddy.”
Then bounces and tickles. I'd say that the rest of the kids were about 80% tuned in- for some reason they loved to see their classmates get bounced and tickled like crazy. And I'd like to think that they were absorbing some of the nuances of natural speech. Some kids were more creative- they didn't just do yes or no answers. I had one little guy called Austin who was fond of acting out large portions of his favorite TV show- or was it a video game? I never really was sure. But the great thing was that he would fill in the bits he could say in English and then the rest was wild gestures and sound effects. For example: “There big dog!!!! Big big big big dog!!” To which I or the students could ask "What color was it?" or "Was it a mean dog or a nice dog?" (being sure to convey with my body language and facial expression what mean and nice mean) then Austin would go into a series of sounds (a jet? a big truck? birds?)
I'd make guesses and encourage the children to guess what he was saying (which they'd often try to do in Chinese and I'd encourage them to try in English). Was it irresponsible for me to do this rather than the prescribed Hess conversations? Maybe, but I don't really regret it. Those were some good times and I think it contributed to my students vocabulary and their sense of natural speech. Usually we could go through 3 or 4 kids before the class's attention would begin to wander off. Of course all of the students wanted to be the one to answer questions and we didn't have time for all of them. Sometimes if a student was really upset he didn't get a turn, I'd write his name on the board and promise his turn would be the next day.
There were a bunch of other activities I would do during sharing time. I really wish I'd introduced some type of 'show and tell' but I think it might have been tough to introduce that with out raising the suspicions of Hess management. Lessons were laid out in the teachers guide by 5 minute increments. At first I thought this was more of a guideline than a literal thing- but then I had my 1 month evaluation and really followed the lesson plan except I didn't play one of the sharing time songs - and got docked points on my evaluation because of it. So any of my own ideas had to be done under the radar.