cross culture

so I was teaching yesterday afternoon. It was the first day after half term and the week before they'd had OFSTED so it was a much brighter atmosphere in school from the last time I was there. I had some new kids again who were reading different books to in the past. In one of my groups we were reading a book called the 'Stowaways'. I don't particularly like the book because it's hard to engage them in what's going on. The main character doesn't have a name because it's written in the first person and the two boys in it want to be sailors, not footballers like most of my boys! So I was trying to engage them with the interests and asked if anyone had been to the sea. One of the lads then went into this enthusiastic tale of how he was playing baseball at the beach once and the ball went in the sea. Sorry....baseball?!?! Since when has anyone in the UK played baseball?? We played rounders when we were at school, and in the summer term at uni in the parks, but although a similar game, we would never ever have referred to it as baseball, or known really about baseball. So I was sat there thinking...flippin tv, all this American rubbish our kids watch!!!

Then later in the afternoon I was working on some one to one reading with particular children. One of whom had just started the school that day. His literacy work was poor for a year 4 and he was far behind a lot of his classmates. I was reading a book with him and it was talking about heroes. The first hero was an American athlete who had won the 100 metER race, the 200 metER race and the 400 metER race. I appreciate that the book was about an American, and was probably from the States itself, but these children are struggling enough at nine years old to read simple words like 'when' and 'around'. When they actually get round to working on their literacy skills they see the word metre spelt 'wrongly' three times, they learn what it looks like and then the teacher marks it wrong when they write it and it knocks their confidence back even further forcing them to retreat into themselves and gain no confidence.
hmmm, have I ranted enough there? I know I'm a stickler from grammatical errors, and spellings is a little bug bear of mine, but if we're teaching our kids English, it makes sense to provide them with English books, at least until they're old enough to distinguish between the two spellings, doesn't it???