I had a chance to "review" this one, as it was shortlisted by my school.

Before I start, some disclaimers:

This is my quick and dirty personal set of observations, not the school's. As such, it is very possible I've missed something. I've intentionally focussed on listing the technical aspects rather than posting a review per se. These are those niggling type issues that will ultimately drive you up the wall. I've also intentionally refrained from making any overall judgements and not provided my opinions on the syllabus and topic order (my coteacher shortlisted some books based on this, and I'd rather leave those suggestions up to someone with greater experience), so you'll find the syllabus isn't touched on at all here. Please check over these books yourself if asked for an opinion, especially the syllabus pages of the teacher's guide. If your school is in a hurry to choose between two or three good syllabuses/syllabi, then hopefully these notes may help you identify a few things to look for in the CD and books that are easily overlooked and make a decision.

 * * *

Student Book:
Thin, but moderately well bound. Survived a table smack. (4/5)
Severe lack of player cards in the back (1/5)
Plenty of English exists in the book, however, spaces for student writing is impractically small. (1/5)
Typesetting is questionable: entirely using Arial and Comic sans. No tracing sections and minimal ruled lines. (2/5)
Layout is consistent between chapters. (5/5)
Average.

Teacher’s Guide:
Comprehensive, but with a strong focus on listing English you may wish to use in class. All syllabus and pedagogical information is presented strictly in Korean. Shows a distinct lack of aids aimed at native speaking staff members, but this is unfortunately standard. (3/5)
Images of the student’s textbook appear throughout, but are not annotated. (4/5)
Syllabus pages are single page and fairly tidy. Aims are monolingual (Korean). (4/5)
Average.

CD ROM:
CD Jewel case required breaking with scissors in the centre to release the CD itself. Two CDs tested were readable but would not load with the latest Flash installed on one computer, instead hanging on the opening screen. Functioned as intended on a different computer. (1/5)
A clickable book interface is available. Some minor delays occur when used. Poor colour contrast (green on green) makes my eyes genuinely hurt in places. (3/5)
Imagery on animated segments is very childish and seems cheap. Mild racial caricatures exist. (2/5)
Acting in live action segments is very unnatural. Most voice work appears to have been redubbed over and is echoey. Roughly on par with the standard set by the old National Curriculum books (2/5)
Average, when it works.

Age Appropriateness:
Questionable. The imagery depicts characters mostly a little younger than the age of the audience. (2/5)
Below Average

Other Notes:
Compacts the course into 15 chapters instead of 16. This is advantageous as the final chapter tends to be filler at best, or skipped at worst. This would allow for extra revision time at the end of the year. I feel this is a far superior decision to leaving a critical grammar point such as past tense to the last few weeks of the year.
Some chapter themes struck me as political at initial glance. This concerned me at first, being an English text, although having watched some of the videos related to the chapters in question, I can say they never stray from teaching English as a focus.

My school chose this book (more accurately, my main co-teacher chose it without consulting any of the other English staff. Guh.)

I've only spent the past day working out what it's like, but I can already tell this book is not going to be the best. Even the interim books from last year were better. I feel like we've stepped backwards into the old gut-wrenchingly-horrible national curriculum.


There's WAAAAY too much Korean in the CD. All segments have directions written in Korean, with a man's voice reading them aloud, with no prompt. Just turn the page, and boom, male Korean voice reading the instructions before the class can even listen to the English directions the teacher was going to say.

The live-action scenes are dubbed over, making it feel like we're watching Godzilla at times. Nothing too horrendous during the 1st lesson, but I'm poised for catastrophe.
Also regarding the acting scenes, one of the videos has two girls (who are supposed to be talking to each other), both looking stage right when it pans to them, making the viewer realize "Wow, whoever directed this did not give a crap."

The dialogue is just awkward. "You're in the 1st grade. Congratulations. My name is Ms. Jong. Glad to meet you!" No no no no, just no. No one says that.

I'm sure I'll be finding more & more glaringly awful things as the weeks roll by.


So.... yay! Anyone else using this book?
I'll hopefully be making some lesson plans / material this week & post them up.

Do the moderators have any idea how the forum can handle a rush of new teachers, each dealing with one of eight new books? Shall we post materials like "Grade 6 - YBM (최희경, 오마리아) - Lesson 1" or something?


-Peace!

I just started working at a public school yesterday (first time in Korea, first time teaching ESL) and my teacher gave me these books and told me to prepare to use them. As it stands, I find them very confusing, but I'm attributing a lot of that to being new to the game.  I'm looking forward to seeing how you guys find them and I hope I can contribute some stuff, too. Are all textbooks usually THIS Korean? I have a hard time following what I'm supposed to do, exactly, since the instructions tend to not be in english. Can anyone offer some tips on how to intuit what I'm supposed to do? I have even more motivation to perfect my hangul now.

We're all in this together! 

I hope so :)

This is my first time in a public school and we have this book.  Just started looking through it now - really not sure where to start.  Any advise on how to prepare?

Thank you for the advice.  I'm already doing an introductory / ice-breaker lesson.  Just having trouble trying to work out exactly what to do with the textbook!  I need to track down an English teaching guide :)

I like the standard lesson structure that you described though.  I just watched a video of a previous teacher here, and it was very similar.

It's the overuse of Korean that I find frustrating here.  There simply isn't any need to use Korean - it's lazy!  If you've ever taught multi-lingual classes before, you soon realise that carefully selected English instructions + pictures can solve / explain almost anything.

The CD is almost unusable.  These are 6th grade students who will surely just laugh at the sickly, cartoon animations.  The dubbed speaking sections are cringe-worthy.

As the teacher above posted, this will be a year of PPT and other activities, using the book only for reference and target language.

Hi, I was wondering if anyone had a digital copy of teh 5th grade Resouce Book? I've had 2 co-teachers for 5th grade already and the book is now missing.

Also, yeah, these books bite. They don't focus enough on their target vocabulary and phrases and will throw in other new things that should be the focus of their own chapters. As such, not enough time is really spent on one or the other. Also, that they expect me to print and cut out (and laminate!) cards for every student is insulting, I don't know why they didn't just put them in the back like the old National textbooks did.

Does anyone know if there is a digital version of the supplementary materials for this textbook? It's the stuff in the back of the book that students rip out for Play Together. Sometimes students rip them out prematurely and lose them before we do the game. I also want to make my own games but I need doubles of some of the materials. I don't want to photocopy them because it looks terrible...

I went to the YMB site here :

http://ybmtextedu.com/subject/subjectList.do?classCd=2&subjectCd=29&subjectManageCd=57

I couldn't find it. Does it simply not exist???

There's a lot of supplementary material included on the teacher's DVD. 

Just click on the fountain and/or the star in the middle of the lesson selection screen (there's different stuff in each).  The menus are in Korean, but if you click around and randomly download stuff, you can find a lot of useful materials!

Actually, I don't know if the exact cards from the students' books are included, since I had to give away my last copy to a transfer student...  But there are definitely materials you can use for your own games/ppts.

Oh, and in case you didn't find it elsewhere already, here's where I posted the ZIP file of the entire 5th grade teacher's book in English:
http://www.waygook.org/index.php/topic,35609.msg293938.html#msg293938

I don't think this is the right spot to put this, but it relates to all Chapters of this book...StoryLand.  Absolutely dreadful.  Anybody come up with any good ideas for it?  I've done the book route, sentence scrambles, and role play...but can't seem to come up with anything better.

My most successful Storyland lessons have been the ones involving the original source of the book's (terribly re-written) story.  The best was "The Giving Tree" (for 5th grade Lesson 1) since the students had already read the story in Korean, so it wasn't too confusing in the original English.

I use lots of YouTube resources, even just a reading of the original story.  I've posted something for almost every 5th grade lesson's Storyland in its appropriate thread.  (Except a few that we skipped so as to finish the lesson in time for the midterm/final exam.) 

If all else fails, I find a cartoon that ties in somehow, and then have them make sentences about it using target language.  (Example: Looney Tunes "Beanstalk Bunny" for 5th grade Lesson 9 to go with the "Jack and the Beanstalk" story, and then students make past tense sentences about the cartoon using a PPT and play a bomb game with related theme/content.)

I don't spend too much time reading or role-playing the (usually contrived and unnatural) dialogs from the book, but really just use their Storyland idea as a springboard to a (sometimes tenuously) related lesson of my own.