LONG WEDNESDAY

Recovery day, blog

Yesterday was Wednesday, May 4th, the day before 'Children's Day' holiday break, and our school sure made the most of it, taking the kindergarten classes to a park for a field day.

Wednesdays are usually pretty long for me, I have morning snack duty at 9:30, which means I have to come in earlier if I need to do prep, I also give up my lunch breaks on Wed. to help the kids return their library books and check out new ones, in addition to the 9 classes I teach which is the most of any day (the last one of which gets out at 7:45) and I usually leave about 8pm. It can be a 10 or 11 hour day.

Back to the morning though, after snack we had what is called 'circle time' at about 9:45 where we put all the kids in the playroom and play a game.

The kid on the left facing the camera about to sit down is Brandon, and he's new to the school but speaks English well. They were playing a game where Zach Teacher (guess which person he is in the picture...) calls a kid up to the front and he whispers an animal to the kid, and then the kid acts out the animal -- hopping up and down for rabbit, roaring loudly for a tiger, etc., etc. -- and everyone who is sitting yells out their guesses. Well Zach whispered an animal to Brandon who smiled and nodded, so Zach took a step back and said, "Okay Brandon, what animal are you!?" And Brandon stood perfectly still and said aloud: "Dinosaur." Hahaha so that started the day off with a laugh.




On to the buses for a short ride to the park, and more pics:

                                                

On top there is Brian, Emily, and Alice. Brian has a perm, and those two girls are as cute as they come. Next is Michelle. Michelle (/her mom) changed her name to Muffy but no one calls her that, and she is awesome. Up next is Cindy, and then on the bottom is Kevin and Jason. You might know Kevin from "Kevin is a friend of mine" hit single from March. He's quit his crying and now is just full of laughs.

Above is Gem, Gem is about 4 years old. I took this pic shortly after he was running a few feet in front of me when he finds an empty cigarette pack on the ground, and his reaction to that was to pick it up and put it in his mouth and turn to look at me. Oh also he's Brain's brother from above, they both have perms. 

Above is the kid's usual PE teacher, he came and ran the whole thing while we ran support. There were pretty usual games of dividing the kids into teams and running them around in races and competitions.

The kids had a 'snack' of Choco Pies and Capri Suns, which I thought was interesting because not only did we run them ragged for two hours from 10 to 12 noon, and now we were giving them a sugar rush, they were pretty beat come about 2pm back at school and starting to get tantrum-y.

The teachers had some fun too: At the end of the day there were races between two kids through a minimal obstacle course and the person in first got a stamp, and the person in second got a different stamp. The picture below is of Kevin with his 1st Place stamp.

Well when Claire Teacher handed me the stamp and asked me to go to the finish line and stamp the kids with the 1st place stamp while she took the 2nd place stamp, I wanted to instantly laugh and say, "Why would you hand me a stamp?"  I started it but within 10 min all the teachers were all having a stamp war with each other that involved (specifically)  a lot of sneaking up behind people and stamping any available skin:

I got double whammed on each elbow at the same time! Let my guard down towards the end, big mistake.

Back to school for normal afternoon classes. Below is a picture I took from my desk. I looked up and down the hallway, and for a while I didn't notice anything unusual. But there's a hidden Tinkerbell there! 

Below is one of the lessons I taught for a class yesterday, talk about right up my ally huh?!

After work when I (finally) left  there was some sort of Parade marching down the street, I couldn't tell if the people were happy or protesting or something. But they had lights and there seemed to be a lot of them. Guess I'll never know...

But the best news of the week (obviously besides the four day weekend) is that the weather is 70 degrees! I have both my windows open right now and I can't even tell! When I first got here if you cracked a window the life would be sucked out of the apartment for a week. I took the picture above of people dining out last night, I can't wait to enjoy the cool evenings.  As for right now it's perfect outside and everyone's out for the holiday. Thus SO LONG blog I'm going to head out!