Sweaty-A State of Being

It really is. When the weather is 98+ degrees and humid you pretty much wake up and go to bed damp.  The rain last week provided a nice change of pace though, instead of my being damp, everything around me was!

It's been awhile since my last post, and a lot's happened. I got a new student (giving me a grand total of eight students), and Pre-K got three (there's 14 of them now...next year is going to be crazy!) and we started school.  I'm enjoying this new semester, I don't feel quite so overwhelmed as a newbie, though I still find it frustrating to be a first year teacher!

The girls enjoying their new "girly" toys that I brought back from the States.

A whole new classroom arrangement...getting ready for centers...and next year's class!

 

We spent our first two weeks of school doing curriculum mapping for all of our subjects for the entire year. My brain felt like it was going to give up by the end of it, it's SO much work!!! Thankfully, that was pretty much the end of the work that the teachers have to do for the ACSI accreditation visit coming up soon! Hurrah!!!

We are right in the middle of the rainy season, which is great for the temperatures, but not so much fun for the Kinders and Pre-Kinders.  Our playground has sand on it, so every time it rains it takes one to two more days to actually get dry enough to play on. We had four days of rain last week, so by the end of the week the kids and the teachers were about to go nuts.  We took them out to the covered basketball court on Valentine's Day for a treat and let them run around.  They got plenty wet, but had so much fun! They also enjoyed the cookies and snacks they got to eat after!

I was so proud of my Kinders today.  We had learned the books of theOld Testament last semester, but hadn't sung the song since the beginning of school. I mentioned that we were going to sing it again today and they were so excited they pretty much just took off!  They made it all the way to Amos before they even slowed down! I couldn't believe they remembered all those books, especially since we hadn't had a lot of time for the last few books at the end of the year!

Now that my life isn't quite so crazy, I'm enjoying making more center activities and incorporating them into my lessons. The kids really enjoy getting to do more small (really small) group activities, and since there are so few of them, I get to work with pairs or individuals on reading or math. I imagine it's a bit like homeschooling a large family some days.

I'm also starting have more time to explore the nooks and crannies of my classroom.  The last teacher left lots of materials and I haven't had time to go through them all yet.  I keep opening boxes and getting happy surprises!  Today I opened a box I could have sworn I'd opened before and discovered about ten really great computer games for the kids!! I'm so very happy!!

In other news, several of the teachers, myself included, have started Spanish classes at the local Japanese community center (that's a mind bender, isn't it?). It's been fun, but crazy so far.  According to my homework, pretty much every conversation I'll ever have starts with "hello, where are you from?" ("Hola, De donde eres?).  Since our homework for every class so far has been to write a "long" conversation using what we learned that day and every other day, my housemate and I have been entertaining ourselves by creating different characters and stories to have the conversations.  Jacqui, being English, is partial to conversations involving Dr. Who, because, as she says "How many places would someone start a conversation with 'Who are you? Where am I? What is this?' We are also learning lots of random words as we use the dictionary to look up words to meet our needs. In addition to making life in South America a whole lot less confusing, I'm hoping that speaking more spanish will help me when Pre-K comes up-none of them are native English speakers. My Kinders were really excited to find out I'm learning spanish, and they enjoy teaching me random words during class  (I may not be able to ask where a bus is going, but I can tell you that an oso lives in a cueva).

I'm looking foward to Easter vacation, because Jacqui and I plan on going to Encarnacion to see some Jesuit ruins. It will be quite a test of our Spanish!

I hope to post soon, but we'll see...I've been trying to post for weeks and you see how that turned out! ;)  Feel free to leave me a message on Facebook or call me on Skype! I love hearing all about what's going on back in the States!

Please keep praying for the school as the administrators look for teachers to fill open spots for next semester.  The school will need a 1st, 2nd, and 4th grade teacher, and a high school science teacher.  If you know anyone who loves teaching an wants to work overseas...encourage them to check the school out! Paraguay is a great place to live and work. It's safe, cheap, and easy to get around! :)