Monday, Monday, so good to me

Well, it's Monday again, and I took the week's lesson plan through its paces with five classes of first grade. Now, the "worst" two classes of the whole week, in terms of behavior, are first and second period on Monday. I can't decide whether that's because of the class make-up or because of Monday morning. Mr Hwang introduced me today to woo-rul-pyeong, which means "Monday sickness."

Well, of course, it's well-known that Monday mornings are tough, from the factoid that Monday morning is the most common time for heart attacks to occur, to the fact noted here that one in four employees calls in sick on Monday, to the Carpenters song "Rainy Days and Mondays (Always Get Me Down)", but only the Koreans have a name for it.

So anyway, I figure if the lesson plan can survive more or less intact through these two classes, it's pretty solid. The starter was relative clauses with where, in which I asked them to write three sentences along the lines of A bakery is a place where people bake bread, cakes and donuts; they choose the places from a list I provided, like museum, department store, bank. Then I ask for volunteers to read their sentence as we go down the list. Incidentally, I ripped the whole lesson from bogglesworldesl.com.

In both these classes, I got two volunteers before I had to start picking on people, but--get this--during last period, someone volunteered for every sentence. I let them go five minutes early!

Which of course meant I got to leave five minutes early also. Hey, just trying to stave off Monday sickness.