Last night I went to yoga with a few of the Chinese teachers and Helen. It was a lot of fun to get to spend time with some of the other teachers. Afterwards I worked on a few of my lesson plans and went to bed with it raining. Around 2:30 I woke up to the loudest clap of thunder I have ever heard. My entire apartment shook! The thunder might as well have been inside my apartment. Then all of the alarms on the bikes and cars went off. This repeated about 5 times before the storm moved on.
This morning I did ‘morning exercise’ with the kids. The teachers have choreographed basic movements to a few songs and the children ‘exercise’ each morning. It was funny, because I didn’t know the motions any better than the kids, so we were all in the same boat together.
There are definitely good days and bad days. Some of my lessons I think are great, but they don't go as well as I would have thought and some of the ones that I’m not so thrilled about go over really well. I taught my L2 classes the Cha, Cha Slide and it wasn’t quite as good as I thought. They really enjoyed it, but it was a little harder for them to follow than I thought it would be. I needed the words to be just a hair slower. We will sing it again for the next few days and see if it gets a little better. My N1 kids I had an umbrella and a kite so we could learn about the weather and it was good. I let them play with the stuff and it went over well. The most shocking part of the day was when we did big/small. I had them stand up and we stretched out our arms wide for big and the hunched down for small and they loved popping back up to be big! It was the highlight of the lesson. I never would have guessed.
For me, my favorite part was when Yoda waved good-bye to me. He has just given me this scowl up until now, but he gave me a small wave. And he participated a little in big/small. He normally just looks at me like I’m the most ridiculous person he has ever met.
In the afternoons I see the L2 students again. There are three classes and each class sends me 7 kids for twenty minutes. So I have three twenty minute classes and I see each of the L2 students once each week. I have a four week rotation for these afternoon classes. Week one is Montessori, week two arts and crafts, week three imagination theme and week four centers. So this week has been Montessori and the objective is for each student to be able to roll up a mat and then walk around it. Someone has either taught these kids this already or they are born with the natural ability to roll a mat perfectly, because I've had four days worth of kids and not a single one of them has had any problems rolling a mat what so ever. This means that we are finished with the lesson in about 5 minutes at most. I've been setting up the mats as an obstacle course and letting them run around them until they get tired and then we color. I've got a wall full of kindergarten drawings now and my room looks a little more used/homey.
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