The Desk Called "what is this"

Teaching children a foreign language is, as I think I've mentioned before, a bit more difficult than I thought it would be. Today, Tuesday, was our "young" day, as we had the pre-K, K, 1st and 2nd grade classes. They are much, much harder to teach than the older students as this is their first real exposure to English for many of them. We started off, therefore, in what we thought would be a fool-proof manner. It turns out that the only thing we ended up proving was that we are fools.

We found these giant flashcards in the volunteer house--about a ton of them, and they had all of these school-related pictures and words on them, like "chalk," "milk," "colored pencils," etc. We would hold the flashcard up, point to the pictures, and say the word, telling the kids to repeat after us (pood-tam-kah). It was after five pictures that I decided to quiz them on what they had learned when I made the mistake. It went something like this:

ME: "Desk." (pointing to desk)
KIDS: "Desk."
ME: "Chalk." (holding up a piece of chalk)
KIDS: "Chalk."
ME: "Pencil." (holding up a pencil)
KIDS: "Pencil."
ME: "What is this?" (pointing to a desk)
KIDS: "What is this."
ME: "No." (shaking head vigorously) "What IS this?" (pointing to desk again)
KIDS: "What IS this."
ME: "Uh oh."

They are like little copying monkeys, all of them--we have to be extremely careful what we say, because even something as seemingly innocent as "So..." turns into a vocab word, echoed by twenty kids, who are probably wondering to what object "so" refers.

For instance, we taught them the "good morning" song, wonderfully performed for us by Maggie and Robbie on the first day. Well, as we were getting ready to leave class today, Robbie decided to put his own twist on the tune, and started muttering "Goodbye, goodbye" to the tune, and a few seconds later we heard three little voices repeating it over and over again like a scratched Buddy Holly record. Good thing it wasn't something more potent than goodbye.