penpal success! : )

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so, i'm back in the office! soo annoying..not only do we not have the internet, but we have no electricity!! they've been doing some insane work..like digging up tons of the sidewalk and stuff near our apt building, and then today some guy accidently cut our wires!! it happened around 12:30, right before I had to go teach so I just left, thinking that by the time I got back they would have fixed it. (i didn't know they actually cut off our electricity, haa). when i got back though steve said he had talked to carol, and she said it would be one or two days before they could get a temporary line...uch, really annoying! even more annoying because the older kids all have tests today and tomorrow, soo i'm the only one who has to teach.
on that note though..today was one of the best days yet with my classes! 😊

Kim (my friend from wagner who teaches 6th grade in NY) had her kids write us letters and they finally got here last week. The letters were great, but I was a little nervous that my kids either wouldn't feel like writing a letter in English, wouldn't understand the letters, would refuse to write to a boy if they're are girl, or would just be too crazy for me to even show them the letters and explain what was going on, lol.. I really thought about it though, and ended up making a one sheet glossary of words that were in the letters that they don't know. kind of random stuff like ice-skating, cartoon, website, tv show, gym, wrestling, and then a bunch of "american chinese food" and some nationalities since her kids all wrote where their families are from. I also searched through about 5 "paper stores" for stationary. I have to say "paper stores" in quotes because thats what people call them..but they really just have random stuff! like really weird, lol..some paper, old cards, some games, notebooks, pens, tape, idk..haha everything in those stores looks like its been sitting there for 20 years! lol, really strange.. but yea, I decided that if I had cool stationary for them to write on, that might help motivate my kids..so I collected a bunch of random ones (i'll put up pics of some of the letters soon 😊 ) I also bought an english/chinese world map so my kids could look up some of the countries Kim's kids mentioned.

So i took the letters in the envelope to my 6th grade class this morning hoping that they would be curious about what was inside, lol..and they were! amazing, lol..actually, it was a little strange cause a chinese techer came in and sat in the back of the room today, but i'm pretty sure they would have been just as good if she hadn't been there cause they got so into it! 😊 I gave them each a glossary sheet and a letter and gave them 10 minutes to just try to understand it while I walked around and helped. Then i brought out the stationary and they were all excited (thank god! haha). They spent the rest of the time writing and showing eachother the letters while I walked around and helped..i still can't believe how smoothly it went! 😊 at the end of the class, they were all asking me how long it would take to get there and if we could write to them again, finally something they like and are actually interested in! amazing!!!

my other classes also went surprisingly well today. with third grade i made packets of words that make up a sentence and gave each word to a different kid, and they had to make the sentence in the front of the room and hold up the words so the class could read them. i thought they'd probably loose interest after 20 min but they were really into it, i'm guessing they've never done anything like that before..

with 5th grade i had a board game i wanted to try having them play in groups, but of course when i went to the copy machine room it was locked (it wasn't even lunchtime anymore?!) then i wanted to just play in teams with it on the overhead, but it didn't work. soo, i ended up improvising (haha, mom..i read those articles). I drew a game board on the board, like a road, and then they told me words to write into each space. i wrote them randomly in three different colors, and then when we filled it up i wrote a key. if you landed on a pink word you had to say a word that starts with the same letter, blue was same last letter, and yellow was name number of letters. they came up with some other rule that you first had to try to find an answer on the board or something, not sure what exactly but they all knew, lol. anyway it worked out well, and i'm gonna try it again tomorrow 😊

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