Let It Snow!

You know how half way through December a lot of people are so sick of Christmas songs that they want to shoot every radio in sight? Well I have a story for you.

About a month and a half ago, the Chinese teachers told us that we needed to start teaching our classes a Christmas song for the big end-of-semester program we have. I decided to teach my kids one of my favorite songs, Let It Snow. I thought it was funny that we had to start in October, but we did as they said. So, instead of teaching our first and fifth class rotations, we had our home room class to sing the song with. My class is all 4-5 year olds, and it was CRAZY trying to get them to sing the same boring song for 40 minutes a day. 40 minutes! I even get bored with that! By December, my kids were SO BORED with the song. I felt so bad.

That's when the Chinese teachers came up to us and told us that our songs were not good enough. They said the kids don't know the words well enough. I thought they were crazy for saying that, because I thought my kids were doing great for learning a whole song in English when they barely know any words. But the Chinese teachers thought otherwise, and we had to come before and stay after class with the kids who were "struggling" with the words. Some of these kids were now singing the same song for over and hour a day. They were getting so restless. But, we got through the extra practices and I gave them all hugs and told them they were doing great.

That's when the Chinese teachers came up to us and told us that our songs were STILL not good enough. So, the last week of teaching our beloved students, they canceled classes! We were now practicing the songs for three hours a day! The kids' poor attention spans were seriously shot. At one point one of my girls, Yumi, actually started banging her head on the table in boredom. Haha it was actually really funny. But dang, they were cute singing all the songs.

I found it funny that the Chinese teachers were okay with cutting so many classes, when earlier in the year they were upset at us when we missed one day of teaching because we were stranded in Beijing, and they were making us make up that teaching day. And now here they are cutting two weeks worth of classes in the end. Weird, huh? At one point I asked our coordinator, Annie, that

"Isn't it more important to be teaching them English, then to be teaching them Christmas songs?"

And she got a shocked look on her face and replied with a sharp

"No! Our production is more important!"

I really don't see their logic at all... but there wasn't anything I could do, except try to entertain my kids as much as I could through the three hours of grueling Christmas song singing everyday. Sometimes I wondered to myself if these poor children would ever forgive me for inflicting this torture on them. So much Christmas music in such small children haha.

They ended up doing very well at their Christmas Program, and I think most of the kids have forgiven me, but more on that later. Here are some great pictures of the kids being bored out of their minds. Enjoy!!

Picture 1: Emily fell actually fell asleep singing the song. Poor girl. She is super cute when she sleeps, though, so I didn't wake her. Picture 2: Ron was showing me some of his pent up frustration. Haha.