Beijing Life Part 3

Class graduation! 

A very large proportion of our day, week and time in China has been work! So this blog update centres around our current roles as English Teachers in Beijing. We thought it would be a great idea to include some of the highlights and challenges of working in China and hope we might inspire you!

Playing on the computer

Many people who know Kara, realise that her English isn't great. She struggles with spelling... its awsum right? Where does that pesky comma go? Or she might drop words from a sentence because "my brain thinks faster than my mouth can talk"- better still, she has an amazing ability to join all the words in a sentence to form one massive word 'doyawantsomebread?'. Additionally, John's native language is also Afrikaans not English! So challenges were a plenty!

Book time

Therefore working as English Teachers was an opportunity we both jumped at to advance our interpersonal skills, gain experience in a new culture and broaden our skills with children but most importantly to improve our English. In Australia last year, we both started and completed a TEFL course (teaching English as a foreign language).

An exciting three letter word Go fish game! 

As useful as it was, we never ever imagined being a English teacher to young learners would be the most tiring or exhausting thing we have ever done! We teach on average 20-25 class hours per week ranging from one to two hours and most recently three hours during the summer.

John's adjective worksheet

The rest of the day consists of lesson planning and administration. John's work schedule is a little more flexible and allows him to come and go more regularly.

For Kara, weekday evenings usually consist of coming home, eating and sleeping, there isn't much energy left after a full day of jumping around! AND there is lots of jumping, falling and playing. We throw balls, we make letters out of blue tak, we hop to different letter sounds, we pretend to be... dogs, lions, jellyfish......

Teaching students and parents!

Although teaching is tiring and often you need a lot of coffee to get through the big days (Saturday and Sunday we do nine+ academic hours), teaching children is also very rewarding. The children give unconditional love and half way through a lesson it's not uncommon for a small child to stand up, walk over to you and just give you a cuddle or a kiss.




Working with children is different from working with adults because you must build a relationship with the family. You meet the father, mother and grandparents. Although Kara works only with children, John works with children and adults! John needs to cater for and juggle such diverse learning styles and capabilities.

Although teaching is hard work, extremely exhausting and tiresome, we have had an amazing ride thus far! We have learnt so much about how children think, how to teach effectively and have built many precious relationships. We wouldn't have traded this experience for anything!

Tot siens
John and Kara

Picture of Kara by Thomas (4 years)

Foot five!!