just call me baagst.....

a few of the advanced english class students at the Arvikheer museãm. we practice speaking skills,and pronunciation top 2 and left

ecology club members have many awesome projcets above below and left

ecology club members top and left...

knitting club at the dorm!

english class at the dorm

Just call me baacsht ..which roughly translates to teacher in Mongolian. Though a social worker by education, I have found that I am mostly teaching English here, and I love it! However, I really need to brush up on my language skills. I cannot diagram a sentence to save my life, in fact I don't think I spelled it right either!

I currently teach two English classes to the dorm students (a few of them shown above) and they are wonderful, bright, eager, loving, sweet and sometimes mischevious! Mostly they just need more love and attention, which I am doing my best to give them. I have little teaching experience so am learning and flying by the seat of my pants! Some training this summer has at least helped me attempt to plan class time and what we will cover. There are over 60 students who attend the two classes! Sometimes I have 15, other times 30 with varying skill levels so it is challenging. I resort to playing games (hopefully they are educational), toss a spiderman ball to a student, try to pronounce their name (they made name cards with their names written in English) then ask them a question. The hour passes quickly and at least they are having some fun (me too)! One of their favorite activities is writing on the board so we do that every class, as well as using dice to practice counting and playing games in teams...

I have an amazing counterpart/dorm teacher, Octay, and we have found that we are of one mind when it comes to the dorm students and what they need!
Witness Octay teaching kids to knit! We have our own little stitch and bitch, Mongolian style going on! It was her idea and I happily joined in, even though it's on Saturday afternoon ...We started out with about 7 girls and within 2 hours had 20 kids there! Some already knew how to knit and others (including a few boys) were eager to learn! I brought chopsticks for those without needles and bought the locally available cheap yarn for the kids to practice with. They are so proud of their accomplishments and it makes my heart full!

The advanced English class is one that I mostly just practice speaking skills with and assist them with pronunciation. One of the interesting words we discussed was lion. They always say it like "leon". I told them that is a boys name, and if they want to sound like a native speaker....lion it is. Always a lively discussion in that group!