My first week teaching in Ayutthaya, Thailand

Sometimes, taking the plunge headfirst is the only way to get started – as our TEFL intern Matt found out during his first week teaching English in Thailand!

The next morning, we started by taking our first kindergarten class! Asked to sing a song with them to start the session, my partner and I looked at each other and somehow asked each other with our eyes “do you know any children’s songs?!” We quickly settled on “Heads, Shoulders, Knees and Toes”, which would be a mainstay of our time at school with the kindergarteners, though we also did plenty of “Old MacDonald” and “If You’re Happy and You Know It”. I’d definitely recommend having a good few children’s songs committed to memory before going on the internship, just in case you do end up teaching kindergarten, which we hadn’t been expecting.

The hour session with the kindergarteners was fun, but daunting. You have to just get into the mind-set for that age group, and try to have as much fun with it as possible. After that, Amm gave us the “lesson plans” we had been promised. These were actually just a list of topics we could cover for each grade. She explained that we didn’t have to worry about fitting them all in during our time here, and that we could do them in any order we wanted and however we wanted. This was giving us a lot more freedom in our teaching than we had been expecting, and we were thankful for it, as it meant we could craft the lessons as we saw fit. Amm also told us to emphasise speaking and listening skills in our approach to lesson planning. I had a lesson immediately, so had to think up how to teach the first topic on the fly. Amm stood aside and let me get on with it, translating explanations or instructions into Thai for the students where necessary, but otherwise letting me do my thing. She would do this in every lesson during my time at the school and I was incredibly grateful of her reassuring yet unobtrusive presence. It made the lessons go by as smoothly as they could.

For extra support at the beginning, my partner and I agreed that we would sit in on each other’s lessons to help if necessary or throw out some ideas if we got stuck. This actually didn’t end up lasting long however, as we quickly got comfortable without each other as we started planning lessons in advance and again thanks to Amm’s presence.

That evening, we met the other interns at a coffee shop in town and were later picked up by our school director’s daughter, also a teacher, and her boyfriend and taken to a restaurant in Ayutthaya for dinner. We ate at a lovely restaurant by the river (so many places we went to were next to a river…) and talked with the couple, who you could tell were relishing a chance to practice their English conversationally with native English speakers.

The next two days at the school saw us getting into the routine of our jobs. This meant teaching each grade I was assigned to for the first time and trying to get a feel for each class. I was teaching a total of thirteen hours a week, Monday being the most packed with four lessons, and Friday the least with just kindergarten in the morning, which I was very thankful for as it meant I could relax or get things packed ready for the weekends away! By the end of that first week, I definitely felt like all the concerns I had about whether this was something I could actually do were gone, and I was looking forward to the next six weeks at the school. That Friday, when everyone was finished at their school, we boarded a minibus to Kanchanaburi, where we planned to meet with the other interns and see what that place was all about!