How do I get behind so fast?? Blurgh!

Tuesday

I forgot to add this picture to last week's blog post. This is the awesome Angle Construction I had the kids make! It worked out SO well, and my kids all had and used one that they really understood, and got to personalize a little bit. 

The angle-ator (that's what I decided to call it - just now) Each student made their own, which helped them to understand, and then to create it. They also went on angle hunts where they got to go and find different types of angles in all sorts of places. Here's another picture below to give you an idea of how they work:

One arm is glued down (the one on the right hand side), and the left arm swivels around to show each of the types of angles (without bringing protractors into it). This style and method allowed for all of our students to be a part of the lesson, including all levels of skills. It was a successful lesson and I was pretty pleased with it overall.

Thursday

Pretty normal day, considering the craziness of the rest of the week. With sport and then the strike, then Thursdays, which the kids spend most of their time outside of the classroom in CRE, Chinese, and other things:). 

Friday

A final day of the crazy week was just as crazy as I would have expected. The kids were a little crazy, as they are every Friday afternoon. Such is life. 

However, after school on Friday, I had an awesome girls' night planned! Rachel picked me up and we headed out for dinner to Persian Flavours, an absolutely DELICIOUS restaurant. We split a huge thing of butter chicken, beef, steamed rice and Nan. It was sooooo good, but when we were leaving, this is the situation:

We were standing in line to pay, and I looked over to the take-away bar and saw someone's last name written on top of container. 

Megan: "Haha, that person's name is 'Shank'."

Rachel: "Uh, that's a Lamb Shank."

Megan: ".....what's a shank?"

We had to leave the restaurant because Rachel was laughing too hard. 

Anyway; we headed over to Tor's house where there was wine, champagne, snacks, soup, nail polish, youtube, gossip, and games!

We spent a few hours just relaxing, having some champagne, doing some nails, and watching a lot of Jenna Marbles! 

For one thing, we had a big discussion about something that I REALLY miss from home; Ranch Dressing. Sam, if you read my blog, then you would definitely comment on this part:P

This is how that conversation went...

Megan: "What I really miss is ranch dressing! I feel like that's pretty American, because I haven't found it anywhere else!"

Bec: "We don't have ranch dressing."

Megan: "What? Why not?"

Bec: "Because here in Australia we don't have RANCHES, we have FARMS. And you can't have FARM dressing!"

Yes, Thank you, Bec. However, it turns out they DO have Ranch Dressing in Australia. Obviously, not Hidden Valley (The magical place where children love to eat their vegetables), but it does exist. I know this, because today (Monday), Cathy brought some in for me. She's wonderful! 

Saturday

Saturday was pretty low key - Bec and Cruz picked me up at around 10:30, and we headed to the Knox  Shopping Center to look for a dress to wear 'out'. Although I didn't find a dress, I did get to spend a great few hours with Bec, Cruz, Rachel, and Amber wandering around and being girly:). After shopping for a while, Rachel and I headed back to her house and brainstormed some ideas for what to do that night. 

We ended up going bowling, but not before introducing me to some fatally Australian/British shows. I saw the movie 'The Castle'. It turns out that I LOVE Australian humour. Hah! We also watched the first two episodes of the show 'The In-betweeners' which is absolutely awesome and hilarious. I also love British Humour. Hah! We then went to the bowling alley and had a great time, where I absolutely flew the American Flag (I whooped on Rach). It was a great night again! I got home plenty early to have a good night and get a good night's sleep for Sunday, which is where a lot of awesome happened.

Sunday

Melbourne Museum: On Sunday, I headed off around 9:00 am to catch the train into the city in order to make it to the museum before they got busy. I made it at 10:30 to the Wonders of Ancient Mesopotamia. It was absolutely fantastic! Not only did they include all of the incredible history and geography and mythology within the area and time, they brought in the actual carvings from that long ago. Amazing. They included a variety of clay tablets including inscriptions from schools, businessmen, royal scribes and even farmers. They also included the translation of each of the tablets with an explanation of the language and history.
The incredible number of exhibitions they have are amazing!!
The Mind and Body section has some really awesome demonstrations of internal systems and functions in the human body (I won't go into detail on here....). The section on the brain was absolutely incredible! It was divided into areas such as perception, memory, motivation, stress, etc. SO cool. I was glad to note that I do pretty damn well with optical illusion puzzles and brain teasers:).
The Dinosaur Walk was pretty darn cool too! Not only did it cover a variety of dinosaurs who bones remains were found in Australia, they also have a full reconstruction of the largest marsupial that ever lived. It was about the size of a rhinoceros, but looked like a wombat.
There is an Evolution exhibit that includes a lot of the work of Darwin including pages of his journal and casts/stuffed birds that he reported on, as well as another Evolutionary Scientist whose name I can't recall. Near the Evolution area was an area devoted to wild animals. Taxidermy galore! There was a stuffed every animal from every continent everywhere! The animals were organized by geography and standing on steps up the sides of every wall. The interesting part is that there wasn't any labels/descriptions/etc on any of the animals. However, I can't believe I didn't take pictures of any of the equipment used! BLURGH. This shot is of the Australian area of the room, and it's kind of an example of what the rest of the room looked like only from all different continents, and no writing anywhere else.

Sorry about the necessary neck craning to see this photo.
Anyway, they had a 5-6 monitors in the room, which looked like those telescopes you put a quarter into and you can look through, only instead of looking through the eye pieces it displays to a touch screen. You can swivel and turn the camera to look anywhere in the room. First, you point the camera at an animal, and when it's on the screen you touch it. The screen registers which animal it is, and brings up a ton of information including its location, habitat, level of endangerment, diet, and a 360 degree view (which you can rotate to see the animal from all angles). I played with the technology for a long time. It was SO COOL! Combining the visual imaging with touch screen and topic selection. I played in that room for quite a while without really reading any information about animals. Super cool. The only downside I can see is when the museum is really  busy and there aren't enough machines to go around. But, it was still spectacular! So cool...
That's probably it for the museum; now I know why people didn't want to go with me...

Queen Vic

Following the museum, I met Kylen at the Queen Victoria Market, which was cool (as always) and incredibly crowded (as per usual). Kylen got a few things but I didn't - mainly because I didn't bring any cash with me to the market (good choice on my part) - which was because the ATMs had literally 35 people lined up to use them. (Yes, I counted one of the lines).

Something Aussie

Later on we moseyed on up to a store called 'Something Aussie', which is (obviously) a tourist-y center. It was cool, but way more freaking expensive than the market anyway.

Pancake Parlour

We finally made it to the Pancake Parlour, which is a restaurant the kids have been raving about for....since we got here...and I got a hold of some coupons for it:). We found our way back to the Melbourne Central Train station because that's where the Parlour actually is, and found a really cool, funky restaurant that really didn't match its name. The pancakes were FABULOUS, the hash browns delicious, the coupons effective. We enjoyed our time, and then headed out to the aquarium!

Aquarium

We finally made it to the aquarium! Thank goodness I had the coupon (buy one get one free), because although it was cool, it was pretty small, especially compared to the Seattle Aquarium. There were some cool exhibits including:

PENGUINS! This guy slept sitting right there for the whole ten-or-so minutes we were wandering around the penguin area. He really, really looked fake, but then he opened his eyes and looked around.

Although fake-y was pretty cool, my absolute FAVOURITE penguin was this guy.

The entire time we were there, he was literally looking at his reflection in the window and moving and then looking at his reflection again, and then moving and looking back. He was for sure stalking his own reflection, and I think might actually catch it.

"Flo, move! I can't see!" - Deb (Finding Nemo)

The Cuttle Fish were another favourite...they are so weird and cool, as well as masters of disguise...

He's obviously disguised as a hand doing this...

Crazy long-necked Turtles!!

I almost died....

Twice!

Also Jellyfish and stingrays oh my!

Thus endeth the travelling for the day. But Hark! My day was not over! We panickedly got home in order to get to my netball game on time (thank goodness for Rick and Jon's quick and careful driving).

Netball

We were absolutely smashed!! We played hard, and periodically we would meet them goal for goal, but not enough. It's still fun and a great group of people to play with, especially as someone who is not...familiar with or good at the game. Not that I know anyone like that...

Anyway, fun time, long and interesting day! 

Today (Tuesday, 11/9)

Today is not only our host dad's birthday, but also our host parents' anniversary (that was planned deliberately so that he would only have to remember one date). So, we'll be hanging out at home celebrating!

Thanks for listening, hopefully soon I'll have some interesting things to share:)

Wednesday, 5 September

Wednesday

Strike day! I got to get an inside perspective of the Australian teacher's union in Victoria. At 9:20 I caught the train into the city with Blake, some of his mates, and some others from school. We met at the Rod Laver Arena where we heard a variety of speakers including the president of the union, a variety of representatives from different sectors of the union, and the hilarious comedy/singing group Tripod. They were absolutely hilarious, by the way!

There were a lot of issues being tackled at this rally, including contract lengths, work weeks, allocated planning time and other benefits. 

There were several speakers that were so eloquent and passionate that you couldn't help but listen to what was happening! In the stadium there were 15,000 people...we were up in the nosebleed section...this is what we saw:

Holy crap!!! Also, after the ridiculously long speeches that, toward the end, were a little less eloquent, probably about 13,000 of those people began walking through the city. Because we were at risk of being trampled, I only really got one photo of the protesters...pretty impressive as it is, though:

It was awesome to see all of the people on sidewalks, in cars and buildings and everywhere supporting all the teachers: honking, yelling, cheering, etc. It was awesome!

After the march to parliament, we headed to a restaurant in Richmond (I can't remember what it's called) with fantastic cider called, 'Dirty Granny'. I saw the label and almost laughed out loud. 

Nature Plank Walk

On the way home from the train station, Kylen and I walked through a variety of parks and trails looking for good..planking areas. We were successful: Here's a sneak peek. The rest will be uploaded to facebook:

Kylen, terrified, planking on the 'Friends Bridge'

I also almost died. Going into the water head first almost.

Monday - Whoops, I forgot!

On Monday evening, Kylen and I also went out to see the movie 'The Sapphires'. I'm pleased to say it was a pleasantly surprisingly good movie! From the previews, we were expecting basically exactly the story of 'Dream Girls', but there were such awesome things going on that were deeper than the expected plotline. I would definitely go see it, especially if you LOVE sixties music:) At the end of the movie, Kylen and I were leaning in to each other, smacking the armrests and each other. It was awesome! And quite intense. Overall, I would give it a ... seven out of ten sapphires!!!! ;)

Just over a week went by...Whoops!

Monday through Thursday

Last week was a pretty typical week. Blake and I did a lot of planning for the next two weeks, because today I begin taking full control of the classroom on Monday the third. 

Friday

Friday was the day we had our staff part after school! The theme was Around the World, and everyone had to get dressed up as a different country, and bring food from another country. So, naturally, I decided to dress up as an American! Me, Kylen, and Melissa all decided to be American. Kelsey's host parents have hooked her on Hawthorne, so with her jersey (and hidden socks) she was an Australian! With several weeks of hunting, we eventually came up with the following:

It was a ton of fun! I'm again forced to concede that I have a really super awesome staff at my school, and am super glad I was placed where I am! We stayed the night at Rach's house, and helped her clean up quite a huge mess in the morning. :)

Saturday

Saturday was a pretty slow day, as we were all quite tired from the night before. It was an absolutely beautiful day outside, but Kylen, Melissa and I were all so exhausted we spent a while vegging out on the couch watching movies. I eventually convinced Kylen and Melissa to get out of the house and come for a walk with me and we headed to a primary school down the road so that I could play basketball, basically. We just had a nice relaxing day:)

Sunday

Sunday was an absolutely great day! At about 11:00, Bob and Judy came to pick us up for a father's day barbecue! We went out to Ringwood Lake Park to have a great time! Got to see Bob and Judy, Andy and Jo, and meet some of the other family members that I haven't met before:)

It was beautiful out there! It was a fabulous day, they got there pretty early, so we had a great spot in the grass in the shade and sunshine near the bbqs! You'll notice that Bob has quite a nice friend in his pocket.

We also found an interesting..... 'sign' (I'm using the term loosely)....which was only the tiniest bit terrifying...

Probably completely unrelated, there were some curious bubbles in the pond directly to the side.

hmm...

After our walk (where we found the crocodiles), I learned how to play Cricket, and Footy! It was so much fun! I'm told that my bowling is illegal by a 9-year-old, but everyone else seemed to support me!

A few hours later, Kylen, Melissa and I headed over to the Ringwood train station to go into the city for a bit (Melissa had never seen the Queen Vic Market). By this time it was about 2:00 pm, and the market closes at 4:00 on Sundays, so we hurried!

When Bob dropped us off at the station, we saw our train coming around the bend....so we started running!! We 'touched on' with our Myki passes (which basically just tells the system we're getting on the train). We got through, and realized that we had to cross the barrier and go back over the overpass to get to our train!!!! It was slowing down now, so we really sped up and were running across the overpass (only looking a tiny bit silly). We got down to the end and Kylen quickly touched on to get on the train (again, letting them know she's getting on the train).
Melissa and I touch on. However, the gate doesn't open. Meanwhile, Kylen is walking onto the train. Melissa and I switch turnstiles and try again. And then again. And then again. We can see Kylen through the window of the train, and she has found us three seats together. Meanwhile, Melissa and I are still trying to get through the darn gate!!! Slowly (like in slow motion) the doors close, and the train starts to move. With Kylen on it, and Melissa and I are still on the other side of the gate. It was definitely in slow motion that Kylen looks around, very confused, and watches us slide away on the train station, as her train pulls out of the station.
Melissa and I stood stock still for a while, until we busted up laughing, standing in the gate (I'm sure frustrating the guys working and the other people trying to come the opposite direction).
We laughed for a solid five minutes, thinking we may in fact be in a sitcom of some kind. The guys working double checked our cards, and the gate wouldn't let us through because we were already touched on on the other side. I quickly got a text from Kylen, and she got off at the next station to wait for us. Fortunately, the next train was only about eight minutes later. It was a pretty hilarious eight minutes, for sure. Also, for the rest of the day, anytime my mind wandered back a few minutes a got a great laugh:).

Anyway; we eventually made it to the Vic Market, and I found some great stuff just as the booths were closing up:) Although Melissa didn't get to see the market at its fullest (we'll be going back), but she really enjoyed it, and can't wait to go back! :)
After the market we headed back toward the station, wandering around, taking some silly pictures. It was fantastic. We actually found a variety of....elephants. After meeting a couple of guys who (what looked like) were doing a photo scavenger hunt and taking pictures of these....elephants. And here they are:

Sorry - can't turn the darn picture on here...

Taa-daa!! Freaking Elephants! Everywhere! It was so funny, and so much fun! Haha!

We also took a couple of extra shots that were pretty fantastic such as:

Taa-daa!!!! This is my BLOG!!!!

This is Kylen planking on a bike rack. Thank goodness she didn't drive away without us this time...

Monday

Sport!!! I finally got to take my softball team to play!! We played two games, lost one and won one! The other coach was really great and understanding, and his team was about the same level of understanding of the game as my kids. Hah! Thank goodness!! :)

Today I also introduced a really really really cool introductory lesson on angles. We started out talking about the difference between 'angles' and 'angels'. My other host teacher and I also collaborated to develop an angle-practicer. I will be putting a picture of it on here, but I don't have it with me right now. It was a real success, and I'm so excited about it! More on that later...

Tuesday

Hoop time!!! Today we took both level three classrooms to a basketball centre for a whole day of basketball fun for all of the kids. Three other teachers and I each took one time of 8-9 students and played 5-6 games throughout the day. ALL of our kids had SUCH an awesome time, and we didn't have a single behavior problem ALL day. We had a large number of wins and a fewer number of losses overall, I think, and everyone had fun, coaches included:)
My team, called the Panthers, were 1 and 4 throughout the day. However, they all kept their heads high and smiles on their faces. It's amazing how supportive our kids can be in a team situation when they are pitted against other teams. This is a mentality that we have been hugely pushing for all the kids before they all go to camp at the beginning of next term. Unfortunately, I miss the camp date by only one week! My kids have been begging me to stay longer, and it's heartbreaking! Because watching everyone plan it makes me want to go and be a part of it SO badly!! Bah!!

That's all for now, folks. Tomorrow I'll be going into the city for a protest! We will also be going to the aquarium (hopefully) after the fact. I'll let you know how it goes! Thanks for listening:)
-Megan

Sunday, 27 August

Sunday

Instead of going to Chadstone yesterday, we had kind of a slower day, which was really nice. I blogged in the morning and then helped my host parents with some gardening in the backyard. They have their own chipper! They called it a mulcher, but it was so super awesome! Haha. I played with it for a while and got a lot of work done in the backyard as well.:)

Our host parents offered to take us to a shopping center called Knox....something. It was pretty funny, and we found the best possible beginning to our costume for the party on Friday (the theme is Around the World). It was a pretty fun walk-around the mall as well:)

Sunday night I had Netty, and although we all played pretty well, we lost 26 to 13. Haha. It was ridiculous, but I'm relatively certain I only had one obstruction call, and one off-sides call. Pretty impressed with myself for sure.

Monday

Today was a pretty good day at school. It was definitely busy, as the classroom always is. Haha. After school today I had kind of a nice relaxing afternoon...and that's about it. Sorry I'm on the boring side today...hah.

Oh - I found a pretty awesome website for creating math practice sheets very personalize-able. This could be very helpful for lots of people:

www.math-aids.com

It's pretty good:)

Friday, Saturday, Sunday

Friday, 24 August

Book Week Dress up Day! Today we celebrated children's books all day! Kids were prompted to dress up in the costume of their favourite book character; which was absolutely awesome. Some of the teachers had some pretty cool costumes too. Some of us, like myself, were kind of at a loss when preparing and choosing a costume, because some of us didn't read all of the same books growing up. I wanted to dress up as the Man in the Yellow Hat from Curious George, but I was told that probably the kids would really get it. Damn! So, I went for the next best thing; I got some wire, pulled on my tall striped socks, and went as Pippi Longstocking. I'll get a picture up here as soon as I can, but I of course didn't bring my camera to school, so photos of me dressed up are not in my possession.
The three male teachers at my school who, for the first time (ever, they said) didn't dress up as women. They went as oompa loompas from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory; orange face paint, white pants, brown shirt, awkward spray painted green basket for hair (that was terrible), but otherwise it all worked out well. In the afternoon to actually celebrate book week, we split off into houses and read a children's book together. After reading the book, all of the students worked together to build a mural out of large butcher paper. The adorable books we read were:

A Bus Called Heaven by Bob Graham

Look! A Book! by I can't find who

No Bears! by Meg McKinlay and Leila Rudge

One other book I can't remember; I'll double check on Monday and add it.

Also for the last couple weeks we've been reading a series of six children's books chosen by...a group of very important people I'm sure, for us to read to every student in the school, and then have all the students vote on their favourite as well as discuss the books and different attributes of them. The books we read were:

No Bears by Meg McKinlay and Leila Rudge

The Last Viking by Norman Jorgenson and James Foley

Rudie Nudie by Emma Quay

Come Down, Cat by Sonya Harnett

The Runaway Hug by Nick Bland & Freya Blackwood
And....one other one that I can't remember. I'll come back and add it.

Anyway - these were all great books that I really enjoyed, and I think for the most part the kids did too!

Friday night we headed out to a restaurant called the Skinny Dog Hotel, which was really, really delicious. It turns out chicken parmigiana here is absolutely magic! Breaded chicken, like we have at home, but instead of the ham folded into the chicken, the ham is laid on top and then covered in cheese. Wow it's good. Luckily, Blake ordered a huge one, and I got to eat the rest:-D. It was a nice, low-key night.

Saturday, 25 August

Here was the plan:

Go to Maling Road (a cute little street of Boutiques and Coffee shops), find a fun dress/top to wear out tonight, go home and relax. We did not stick to the plan.

We picked up Kelsey from the train station and we all hopped back on the train and headed up to Maling Road. We walked around those shops for a bit, but the very cheapeast things we could find were along the lines of...a scarf, for $60. Although Kelsey found a fabulous dress/top thing for a decent deal, we headed back onto the train after not too long. Choo-chooing back along the train track, we were about to pass through a different stop, when we decided just to get off and explore a little bit! Hah.

We hopped off the train at a random stop and started wandering around. This train station apparently is attached to a mini-mall kind of thing. There was a HUGE food court with chinese, chinese, vietnamese, japanese, chinese, general asian, and more chinese cuisine. It was interesting to see and listen to the variety of languages being spoken in this little shopping center; seriously diverse area. After striking out there, too, we headed back to the train to get to our home station. After making it there, we had to wait about twenty minutes for a bus to take us all the way home, but we went to the chase across the street to see if we might have any more luck:P We didn't. Although we did run into my host teacher, and two of Kylen's students. 

We hustled back home to get ready and then headed out to a Vietnamese restaurant called Tahnh Tahnh I think? Pronounced Tauntaun - like the animals that get cut open to hide Luke on Hoth. It took me a while to get over that before I could start eating their food, but it was delicious! :-D

My new favourite I think is Lemon Chicken - way better than Orange chicken at home. Yummm!!

The rest of the night we went to a few different places; one of which had a pretty decent live band playing, but some guy there tripped and fell right into Kelsey like dominoes! It was so ridiculous to watch - funny, after we found they were both okay, but it was crazy! We had a great time with Blake and some of his mates from footy, and did well in forgetting this past week (that was pretty difficult for all of us) and just having a good time! Exactly what we needed:)

Sunday, 26 August

Tonight we may go to a huge shopping center called Chadstone with a friend of mine from school, and then I have a netty game tonight at 8:15. I'll let you know how it goes after it all happens, but thanks for reading!

Lots of love,

Megan

Wednesday, Thursday

Wednesday Night

Kylen's friend from school, Sam, and her husband Arb took us out for dinner!

We went to a street in the city called Lygon Street (not too far from Brunswick street where we got lost). All along Lygon Street is a ridiculous number of Italian restaurants. Literally, six in a row, then a bar, then six or seven more. Outside of each of the restaurants is a huge menu and a person trying to get you inside. They will talk to you and talk to you and talk to you and talk to you. It's ridiculous! They talk so fast, and they are so full of crap it's hilarious to just listen for a while and say, 'Oh, we just ate dinner' and then walk away. Hah. Here are some samples:

"Best homemade pasta in Melbourne"

"25% off your drinks!"

"25% off your whole meal!"

"First round of drinks free!"

"First two rounds of drinks free!"

"What did that last guy offer you?"

Hilarious. Seriously intensely competing with each other. Eventually, we went across the street to a different place where Sam and Arb have been lots before and recommended highly. The food was absolutely incredible, and the company was even better!

Sam, Arb, and Sam's sister Rachel are so absolutely sweet! They shared their ideas, their experiences (and plenty of hilarious stories from chasing monkeys in the Phillipines) as well as being so absolutely fun!

Kylen and I have both had a pretty rough week, and last night (and tonight) were really, really needed. 

After dinner, Sam and Arb took us to an superb dessert place; more chocolate and truffle and tart than I have ever seen! It was all so absolutely beautiful - but of course we were stuffed from the fabulous dinner we had just eaten! Kylen and I settled on delicious gelati - still wanting to take advantage of the fantastic shop, but not wanting to pass into a food coma on the way home:-D. The gelati was absolutely fantastic, and a wonderful wrap up to a great night! 

Thursday, 23 August

Yesterday after school, Blake informed me that I would be going as a chaperone to 'Hoop Time', a day of basketball for all the fives and sixes at our school. The classes were broken up into five teams of 6-7 students each, and we drove down the road to the Nunawading Basketball Complex, where each team played four games throughout the day.

Most of the teams had little to no actual basketball training or practice, and so for the most part they were relatively well-matched. Everyone had tons of fun and I got to take fun action photos of kids playing basketball all day! 

Getting back to school I got to spend the last hour of the day working in literacy rotations in my regular classroom, which was doing relatively well when I got there; even if it sounds like the rest of the day wasn't so smooth.

After school today, I went with Blake and Glenn (another teacher at school) to the mall near my house to get prepared for Book Week Character Day; in which everyone (teachers and students included) dress up like characters from books and play a lot of games and have a lot of fun all day! I'll post more about that tomorrow; because I'm not sure what it's really going to look like right now:-D

After finding costumes at the mall, Blake and I came back to my house to pick up a basketball and a Kylen. We headed out to a little park down the road where Kylen and I absolutely schooled Blake at around-the-world (which I haven't played in....a really long time). But he was absolutely de-stroyed; including three point shot. Ka-POW!

After whoopin' on Blake, we headed out to a chinese restaurant which had incredible lemon chicken. I generally get orange chicken, but it's really not big down here, and lemon chicken is everywhere. 

When we finished the delicious dinner (although apparently the vegetarian stuff was really not that good - poor Kylen:(), we decided we needed an ice cream fix, and headed to 'Mackers' - McDonalds - for McFlurries and cones. The first one we went to had a broken ice cream machine. wtf?? McDonalds can't have broken ice cream machines....that's like the best part about McDonalds! Pfft. So, we found another one. Hah!

All-in-all it was a good day! Tomorrow holds in store some more new, interesting experiences - and I will share them! As for now, TTFN!

With love,

Megan

Wednesday, 22 August

Wednesday

Wednesday started out really well with students saying good morning and greeting me warmly when they got to school. Students immediately went to art class, and Blake and I plowed through almost all of our planning for next week! It was awesome, and a very productive morning!

In light of the struggles yesterday, Blake and I decided it would be a good idea to do some kind of classroom community building activity to encourage some camaraderie between classmates, as a lot of the trouble is clashes between students that are blown out of proportion and preoccupy the students. 

I did a lesson on compliments. To start out, we defined compliments; What is a compliment? Is it good or bad? etc. A few kids were under the impression that compliments could be good or bad, and that was definitely something that I had to clarify.

After defining a compliment, students all got a piece of paper. They all addressed it in this way:

Dear Member of our classroom,

After writing the greeting, students were instructed to write a compliment to someone. The compliment was directed to be about someone's personality. Each student wrote a compliment about someone's personality. After writing it, they folded the paper over, so no one could read it. Next, they passed the paper to the person next to them. Everyone then wrote a compliment about someone's schoolwork. They folded it, and passed it. 

We added a total of four real, serious compliments (which were all quite wonderful). Several of them were:

You are a good listener.

You are good at concentrating.

I like how you are a leader.

You always work hard.

As emotional as I am, hearing some of my students read out those wonderful compliments was absolutely perfect, and I definitely almost lost it and cried! That would have been embarrassing...

Anyway. After writing the four real compliments, we then got to the part that would appeal to them as 8, 9, and 10 year olds. We got to write some silly compliments. I gave the examples of:

I like the way you braid your nose hair.

Your ear lobes are very flattering.

Your big toe helps you balance very well.

For the most part, my students didn't really need help coming up with silly compliments. Some of them were;

Your feet smell very nice.

You can jump really high.

You have nice ears.

In a class of 22, with a variety of students who regularly demonstrate poor behavior choices, there were only three letters that had something inappropriate written on them. None of which were terribly bad, just not compliments. 

Even with those few let downs with the letters, I deemed the lesson a success, and I really do think it had a positive impact on the kids today, as today was a much smoother day than yesterday.

I still struggled with some behavior problems with the students, but I'm told I'm doing well. I think I'm doing okay, but I guess I'll just keep working. 

Tonight I'm heading out to dinner with Kylen and a friend of hers from school:)

Tomorrow, I'll be taking students to 'Hoop Time' day, which is basically an all-day basketball tournament. I don't have any idea how it's going to work, so I'll let you know tomorrow! :)

Thank you, and Lots of love,

Megan