It's Raining, It's Pouring

So the buzz from the movie did not carry through to today. Dang shoot! It rained all night last night and so when I woke up this morning and heard it still going, I decided not to get up and run. That made it so that I got an extra hour of sleep, but I regretted doing it because when I woke up and actually saw the ground and how there weren't giant puddles everywhere like I had imagined, I just felt lazy for sleeping in. It did help that I had more time to prepare for my morning's lesson though. I don't know, there's give and take, but I think next time I should just get my sorry behind out of bed and run.

I was really excited for my lesson on patterns this morning. I made different shapes with different colors and put magnets on them so that I could put different patterns up on the board, and then the kids could tell me what parts repeat and then they would make their own and they would have such a blast and be so captivated by my lesson. WRONG! That was not at all how it went. Well, it went better in the 5 year old class, but the 3 and 4 year olds weren't into it at all. It made me really sad. They were into it for the first few minutes, but then I lost them. They would come in and out with excitement, but pretty much I lost them. I was proud of myself though because I stayed enthusiastic about the lesson the whole time even when they weren't.

My second lesson went better. I taught about hiking, but it was funny because I taught it to the 5 year olds first and I kept looking at the clock and I couldn't remember if we finished at 11:20 am or 11:25 am. I convinced myself that it was 11:20 am and tried to dismiss them at 11:21 am. Teacher Michelle looked at the clock and told me "no, teacher, four more minutes." Well shoot, I had already expanded as long as I could. Don't worry, I completely had it covered, we played follow the leader, but they had to follow the leader who was staying on the hiking path. You were not allowed to wander off the path or else you fell off a cliff. That definitely lasted 4 minutes, so I was good, but it was funny. And I wonder what Teacher Michelle thinks, I've only been teaching two and a half months now, you'd think I'd have the schedule down my now... but, not so much apparently. The second rotation of that class took longer and we didn't have time to play follow the leader. The other thing that I'm proud of about that lesson was that I showed them that they need to bring a flashlight in case they come to a cave or tunnel. I had them stand up and make a human tunnel with their legs and had the kids take turns going through the dark tunnel with the flashlight. I was pretty proud of my idea because it was pretty spur of the moment, but Teacher Michelle made it even better by turning off the lights and closing the curtains so that it really was a dark tunnel- thank you Chinese teachers.

It was raining all day today and my lesson was all prepared for the afternoon so I decided to take a nap. I told myself that I would for sure get up when it went off and I would find something to do so that I didn't just sleep my life away. Well, Natalie was tutoring at lunch and she's really loud and so when my alarm went off I justified resetting it because I wasn't really napping for very long, I was listening to Natalie try to get Anna to say the word "ball." Then when the second alarm went off I didn't need justification, I just reset it. I'm so lazy!

My afternoon lesson was on tigers and I had brought paper so that if I had extra time I could let them draw a tiger and color their picture, but in both classes we didn't have the extra time. That threw me, I didn't know my lesson could last that long. I started out the lesson by blind folding the kids and leading them around the room. Then I took off the blind fold and walked them around the room again. The first walk around the room was like humans walking around at night (you can't see very well) and the second walk was like tigers walking around at night (they can see 6 times better then humans in the dark). That's probably what sucked up all my lesson time, it took forever to get all the kids blindfolded (they kept taking them off) and in the second class, the kids wouldn't stay holding onto each other and so the train became disconnected and I had to go and hook them together again. I wouldn't say that was my most exciting lesson ever, but it did go pretty well.

I tutored Kristy after class and then did a whole lot of nothing while I waited for it to be time to go to the Chou's. I really like that family. Angelo gets really sad when I win at the games we play in between reading the pages of the story (we name the items in the pictures, don't worry, it's an educational game) and so today instead of him just saying that he lost, I helped him through the words and gave him second chances, and he likes it better when he only loses by one point versus losing by three (we only play to five). Then for Abby, I tried working with the sounds of the alphabet with her and tried blending words with her. That did not work. In the beginning it did work, but then she thought it was more fun to push the alphabet cards around rather then push them up while she says the letter sound. I'll try again next week and hopefully the more we do it the better she'll be at it. Toward the end of Cami's time she started talking about High School Musical and played a song for me from High School Musical Two. I went downstairs and Betty (the mom) had dinner waiting for me and after dinner I was going to play wii with the kids. They just got it a week ago and today was only their second day playing it. The kids went upstairs to wait for me and I sat with Betty and talked. Dinner was really good, and I had a great time talking with Betty. I told her how I want to go to Hong Kong but Yuling usually takes care of travel arrangements and she's a little indisposed. She told me that her younger sister is really good at travel arrangements on the computer and that if she comes down from Taipei next week then she'll call me and I can have her sister help me out. I love this family, they are so great. Apparently I took too long to eat dinner because the kids came down and called for me. I hurried up and finished my dinner and went back upstairs. It was the first time I'd ever played wii, and boy did I suck. Which, that's no surprise, I wasn't raised on video games and so I suck at pretty much all of them. It was still fun though. I start tutoring them at 7:00pm and I tutor until 8:45pm. I checked the clock when I got back and it was almost 10:00pm. So I must have had fun over there, if I stayed an hour extra.

I'm so bummed that I don't have plans for tomorrow. I had been invited to go to Taipei with Tzu Chi people, but because the past two Thursday lunch meetings have been canceled, I couldn't ask if I was still invited. So Luke and Kaylene are going, but I'm stuck here with no plans. Hopefully I will find something to do, I really don't want to waste any of my time, I've only got five weeks left. Holy cow, that really isn't that long! Shoot! I have to come back to America soon. I don't want to go back to school, I like it here. Well, maybe if I'm bored every weekend for the next five weeks it'll make it easier to come home :o)

I'm newly addicted to my crossword puzzle book so I think I'll do one more of those and then call it a night.