My Pen Pal Class

Once again it is time to talk about my Gss class, or YeNa and company.

I had arranged for 4 friends from back in Canada to write to my four adorable girls in my Gss class. I gave no idea what Gss stands for, thats just the name of the class. Alyssa, Paula, Keely and Angie all took on a pen pal for me (thanks ladies!), e mailed me a letter which I gave them a very specific lesson/level based format that wanted it in. It was this (replacing my information with their own of course):


Dear (Korean pen pals name),

Today is Monday January 14. My name is Andy, I am from Canada. I have 4 sisters and 1 brother. My birthday is September 3rd. I am 22 in Canada, how old am I in Korea?

My fathers job is a custodian, he cleans schools.

And then I asked for a sentence or 2 on how they knew me.

Unfortunately, things didn't run as smoothly as planned. The first day I had the letters ready 2 of the girls were absent and there was a new student. I had to find another pen pal before I could carry on with the lesson. Thats where my friend Khoi (thanks man) came into play. He was glad to have a chance to do this for me.

Once I had Khoi's letter for the next class, I yet again ran into a couple more obstacles. First, because the school had been changing things around so much, we received a new book without having to review the old one. I designed the letters to work as a review...but I was not going to let that stop me from doing the lesson. There was yet another new student however so I had to delay the lesson once again. Instead of finding someone to write the newest member of the Gss class, I just wrote a letter to her myself and filled in my brothers information.

Finally, last Thursday I was able to carry out the plan at last. It was a little more difficult then I had originally anticipated. They have all shown they can read most of those sentences in the past, but usually it was one or two at a time. I think this may have been a little overwhelming for them. Some of the words they were also not used to, like the names and place everyone was from...and the jobs and their descriptions.

I decided to split the writing and reading up into 2 lessons so that it was not too much work for them in one class. They already work 10 times harder then my other classes so I wanted to give them a bit of a break. It was a good call on my part as the next day it pretty much took the whole class to write back.

I also asked them if they wanted to receive a letter back and continue to be pen pals and they all said yes. At least I am pretty sure they knew what I was asking them. All in all it looked to be a pretty good success!