Yeah, it's Friday!! Last day of the English contest also!! I had the fifth grade class all day today and I was really dreading it after how things went on Wednesday!! It went much better today though. We have been working on Newtons 1st Law of Motion and we were planning to do "experiments" today. We only got through a couple of them before I was pulled out of class to get something for Morgan and Cole while the Spanish teacher talked to the 5th grade class for a minute. When I came back, everybody was in the kitchen and jumped out and yelled "sorpresa". There were two girls in the class whose birthdays were today so they (Morgan, Cole, the 5th graders and their Spanish teacher) had planned a party for all of us. All the kids had brought different foods so I got to experience some more real Guatemalan food. It was pretty good. Some (most) of the things that I have tried will definitely take some getting used to!!
The kids played games and then I went and offended everybody when I took a toy gun away from one of the kids who was doing a "play" and shooting people with it. I don't know about the teachers here but I really don't agree with any form of guns in the school ESPECIALLY when they are pretending to shoot people with them!! Other than that little incident, the party was fun. It ended up taking up the rest of the class time until the English Contest so we didn't get to finish our experiments. I am definitely going to need to come up with some more fun ideas to keep the kids motivated and paying attention!!
Today was the last round of the English Contest and was the reading comprehension. This was the first year of their competition so there were some questions yesterday as to how it should be done. The principal, Michelle, the 3rd grade English teacher, Deanna, and myself finally came to a decision about how it should be run. Deanna and I prepared everything last night so we were all ready to go this morning. In the middle of class however, Michelle decided to change how to do it and wanted us to come up with 5 more questions for 5 different stories. (25 questions and the stories were only about 1/4 a page each) Deanna told Michelle that she couldn't do the questions because she was in the middle of teaching her class. Anyway, nobody was very happy and some feelings were hurt but in the end we went with the original plan which worked out great....in my opinion!! The competition was completed, awards given, and pictures taken with enough time for the kids to get back to their classes, get their stuff and be ready to line up to go home!! (It's always a big ordeal to get all of the classes lined up to go on time!!)
I got a great compliment today!! I was in the office after school with Michelle, her sister, Paola, and her mom, Patty. (The same one who asked Morgan to translate for me last week!!) I was trying to talk to them in Spanish and Michelle complimented me on how well I was doing with my Spanish. Then Paola agreed with her and said that she was amazed at how well I was doing. I was so shocked to hear that from them!! It made my day!
While I was keeping busy with my classes, Alysa and Laina were busy with their own classes!! They went on a field trip to the circus that is in town! They had so much fun. They even survived riding in the cramped school bus! They jabbered all night about what they saw.
On the drive home from school there is a little store called 'The Bake Shop'. It is run by some Mennonites that live here and it is the only place that has half way decent doughnuts here. It is only open on Tuesdays and Friday so I promised the kids that if today was a good day, I'd stop on the way home to let them pick out a doughnut. When we got to the roundabout where the store is, it was closed!! We were all disappointed except for Morgan who yelled, "There he is!!". We have been to the store once and she remembered the guy that worked there. He was getting out of a car so we hurried and changed directions to get to the store. As we were pulling up, he was opening the door with a tray of doughnuts!! What timing!! We were all able to pick out our doughnuts and everybody was once again happy. What a great ending to a not so great week!!
No comments:
Post a Comment