Teaching- Not Really My Gift

Kirill and his mother.

Over the last few months I have had the opportunity to teach English to a little three year old boy, Kirill. I don't do a specific lesson, but just spend about an hour and a half playing with him and talking as much as I can in English. It is interesting playing with a kid in the hopes of him learning some English when he barely has a handle on his own. His mother contacted me a few months ago. She is trying to teach her son German and English as well as how to read and write in Russian. Every day she tries to do 20 minutes of spoken English with him. Usually it is just over breakfast but sometimes they watch a children's show (like Blue's Clues) together. She asked me to help because in school and college Russians are taught how to debate, write essays, and proper grammar. But they are not taught what native speakers say to their children (potty training, coloring, the works), which is what she really needed. It has been really interesting teaching someone who would otherwise be fairly fluent in English things like "Let's go wash our hands!" and "Do you have to go potty?"

The other teaching opportunity I have had in Russia is with an Astronomy club. The students there are planning on visiting the Griffith Observatory in the Fall. It is very difficult just speaking English to students who I know can understand less than 25% of what I say, but it is even more difficult to try to teach an English lesson to them! They are all at different levels, and I really hate to see someone completely lost or bored because the subject is too easy. And, of course, I know nothing about astronomy! But that isn't such a big deal because the teacher of the club wants me to teach the students to understand American English, and so I have mostly been focusing on things that they may come across in the USA. This class I am still getting used to still, and the last 45 minutes is usually a kind of loud tea party, where the students talk in Russian with each other and the teacher tries to force everyone to speak English. This has been my last three Saturday evenings.
From this last class has  sprouted a new class, two days a week. I go to a building and teach 9 (if they all come) students English. This has no theme, unless I want it to. It is all mine, but the students are all mostly from the Astronomy club. So, in this class, I get to teach what I want without a teacher hanging over my shoulder while I struggle to teach these kids. The issues I have with these kids is i the wide variations in skill levels. I have three (or two and a half) that don't really need grammar as much as they need to just practice English. The rest of the kids are so varied (from not knowing the basic vocab to just struggling with grammar and gathering vocab) that I don't really know what to do with them. I have split the group in two so that the more advanced kids aren't bored and cheating for the kids that need the more basic material.
The problem is, this is a free class. And the kids don't need to do work from this class. So sometimes they don't do the work I ask them to or as well as I would like. But there isn't really anything I can do! I understand for the basic kids, because what I give them is hard, but the more advanced kids don't like to do the things I ask them like finding phrases they don't understand/believe are slang/idioms in a text, and to know text well enough to read through it quickly/with fluidity. I keep holding out hope for them, though. I feel like maybe after a little while, when they don't have school or are more relaxed with the work they will start to do better. I just wish all the students put out half as much effort as I do in preparing the lessons! Maybe I will just start giving them a lot of notes and vocabulary lists; almost creating a phrasebook with them, so that when the time does come when they will go to America, they realize the importance of our lessons and have something with them to recall what we learned.