This week we had our final Parent teacher Meetings of the semester. I got some good feedback from parents, and learned where they stood on some issues. I learned how they felt about the program, and their child’s place in the program. Some I expected, some I did not. Either way I now have a better understanding of the children, as I can see how their home-life is affecting their class-life, and learned some of their hopes and dreams.

One of the things I have reassured some of the parents that would start is extra vocabulary practice at home. What this means is the children look at their picture dictionary and listen to me say the words over WeChat. They are not expected to read them back to me by WeChat or any other means. The purpose is to expose them to more words, and build up their vocabulary. The children have already built up some excellent listening skills in class. Speaking skills and Writing skills take more effort to learn that reading and listening skills in an immersion class. We are getting there, and despite some worries, most of the children are right where I expected them to be.

We showed the children how to handle a test, how they are written, and discussed what the purpose of tests was this week. We reviewed our vocabulary and grammar from the American tests. I took this time to also compile the children’s classwork grades. Be aware that if there is any problems with a child’s grades I will contact you directly, and privately with some solutions of how to improve the grades. In America and Canada when we talk about grades, we mean activities that either show or give practice to their skills. This grade is not just some arbitrary letter.

On Tuesday the children made Halloween masks to decorate the Halloween party with. Some of them are absolutely beautiful.

This week on Wednesday we took the children to the Military Museum to see the new display commemorating the Long March. This was a very important part of Chinese history, and this week celebrated the 80^th anniversary of its completion. The children got to see a lot of artifacts of Chinese history. They saw old Radios, guns, and paintings of the trip. The children might be too young to understand exactly how harsh the trip was on the soldiers, but they did have their eyes open to some of the difficulties. In the end of the trip we came upon a painting of a celebration showing the end of their march. It was really good to see.

On the same trip we stopped by a local park to enjoy the scenery. We were lucky enough to see some traditional dancing done by some senior citizens at the park. The kids then looked around the park for animals and types of leaves. We wanted them to explore a bit and see what they could find.

On Thursday the children stood up in front of the school and recited poetry. The kids practiced going up and showed no sign of being scared. They were very brave and performed wonderfully. I was told this was a grade one poetry competition, but I am not sure if there was a winner declared by the school. In my mind the APS students were the winner.

On Friday, Zhong De had its Annual Charity Bazaar. We had a lot of volunteers helping with the Bazaar and it looked awesome. Our class’s theme was internationalization. We sold out of almost everything we had to sell. I took a few students around to look at the Bazaar. Keeping 4 different students that have different interests together is not easy, and some of them traded off to stay with other parents of our class. It was unfortunate that our Partner Program the AMS (American Middle School) was out of town during the event, but their booth was manned by volunteers from the teaching staff and the Bilingual Middle school. I am glad that their earlier preparation was useful. The reason they were unfortunately absent was due to the difficulty of predicting air quality and temperatures long term.

This week we start off with a bang as the kids Celebrate Halloween, and I am excited to see their costumes tomorrow.

This week went by pretty quickly for me. The kids were wonderful, and everything in the program seems to be moving along smoothly. We had both PTMs and the PTA this week. During the Parent Teacher Meetings, we were able to discuss a student’s progress, and any difficulties the students are having, both socially and academically. Parents had a lot of ideas and suggestions that we will look into implementing. I’m not sure if many of you are aware, but I get just as nervous at Parent Teacher Meetings as the parents do. I really enjoy working with every single student in the program, and whenever I talk to parents, I am always afraid I will say something that sounds more negative than I meant. The students are doing great, and we have become the envy of the whole school. I hope that I convey that with each meeting. In Canada and America, Parents Meetings are strictly business, the room teacher (Ban-jo-ren) shows parents what the student has done, discusses the positives and negatives of each child, and how to help them. Each parent has about 15 minutes. So far we have done that, but we have also had time to share fun stories about the children as well, and the parents have had a chance to talk to a few of the child’s teachers.

We held our second monthly PTA (Parent Teacher Association) meeting in the classroom this month. We discussed the Upcoming charity Bazaar, Lunches, Halloween, Thanksgiving, World Fair, and the Job Fair. The bazaar and Halloween seems to be very confidently handled by our PTA, and I look forward to seeing what they have put together. We discussed the Parent Lunches: Commonly called the “Mommy Lunches” but to call it that seems to not include fathers from cooking, which I don’t want to do. They have some ideas about what they want to prepare, which seems good. We are still preparing a play for Thanksgiving next month.

This past week we started lunch time etiquette classes. We moved the children’s lunches from the school cafeteria to the school cooking room. (Same room the parent lunches are made in.) Of course we get a lot of non-APS observers during this time, but the purpose of this was that during the lunch period we are teaching the children western table manners. Each day we introduce a new aspect. Last week we learned what a place-mat was, and how it should properly be used, we learned not to put your elbows on the table, we learned that you had to finish your main course before you can ask for second helpings of anything, or have your desert. We learned that it is polite to keep your voice low during a proper dining experience. We also learned how to tidy up the table.

On Tuesday we went to Heng Chun Senior Citizen Center nearby. Once there we talked to the people there. The children sang their songs very well. They danced well. When there was difficulty with the sound at one point we sang “I love you” acapella (with voice only, no music). We did sing the song again later when the music was working. The children then gave some Chong Yang cards they had made out to the residents of the center, and then they gave out some warm socks. The children had a very good time, as did I. The Senior Citizen trip is related to the topic I chose for Show & Tell this week, which was “My grandparents.” It is very common for young people around the world to take advantage of the fact that they have older members of the community there, and not realize how important or interesting these people can be.

Children began to borrow books from the class library this week. They are each allowed 1 book at a time, and they can only borrow it for 1 week at a time. Most of the students chose a book to borrow. Even some of the children who stayed in the school borrowed books to read. Students are welcome to send me videos of them reading any of the borrowed English stories, but I don’t want them to feel pressured to do this. It is my feeling that in Grade 1 stresses like extra homework and responsibilities be slowly added to the children’s lives so they have the time to adapt and understand what they are doing and why.

We have started having the children help clean the room, no shoes on the library carpet is part of this. We talked to them about outward appearance, and impressions. They learned that if a guest comes to our room and sees a lot of dirt and garbage around they will have a negative impression of the class. Same goes for Uniforms, and public actions. I let them know that it’s ok to play and have fun in private time, but certain times are Public times (Flag raising, and other ceremonies) that they need to show that they are respectful. The kids have been very good at following this. This coming week, we are adding sweeping the floor to our chores list.

On Friday at lunch I introduced the children to the game “UNO”. We will be doing it again this week. Some of the children were already aware of this game, and helped to teach the others. Uno is a card game that can be found easily to play at home. The word “UNO” is actually a Spanish word that means “one”. The concept is really simple: match the colour or the number of the card placed down by the last person in a circle. If you have only one card you say “Uno”. If you have no card that can be played you must pick up a card. First person to have no cards is the winner.

This week the children had a moment to play Halloween games on their tablet computers in class. Some students chose later to try the Schoolbo program. If you have this program at home, you can log in.

Choose “School account” at the opening. Then the School code they are asking for is “BD938FM”. The student list will open. Make sure the children chose their own name only. The first password is Black- Bee. This can be changed easily after they have logged in successfully. We will be doing this later this week as well.

This coming week the children have a trip to the Military Museum for the 80^th anniversary of “The Long March”. I am interested to learn about this, but I will research some stories to tell the children during class. The children also have a school-wide grade 1 poetry recital competition on Thursday. They have been practicing poems with Ms. Qian, and it seems to me that they are doing great. Unfortunately in this subject I am not the best judge, as I cannot understand the poems, nor know how they should be pronounced. But I am a great judge of my students and I know they will put their best foot forward in this, and do great.

Wow, am I tired. This has been a long week, but it has been a week of wonderful things happening. October, for those who are not in the know has a week off on the first week for China’s birthday celebration, which left us with class starting on Saturday all the way through to Friday. Yes you read that right, 7 days of school back to back. And it has been a busy one.

To begin with we set the date for our visit to a Senior Centre (October 18^th). Which is why we started practicing some songs to sing there. The children have been practicing a beautiful Chinese song about a momma bird and her chicks. They have a song that is called “Hello How are you.” Both are fun songs chosen by their music teacher. I chose to sing “I love you” from the Barney TV Series. (Non- parents might want to shoot me now) because the meaning is really lovely, and the pace is fairly easy. We also chose “You tickly me” from Sesame street. This is a lively and fun song, but it also challenges the kids to practice speaking / singing faster with their English. I wanted at least 1 song that proved that we are trying to challenge the kids’ language abilities. This does that, and the kids love it.

We introduced Halloween to the students. Their name tags on their desks have all been changed to bats, ghosts, zombies, monsters, werewolves, witches and more. They really liked that, we also had them color some Halloween pictures for our displays out in the hall. The remainder I will put inside the classroom. The students who stay with me on Wednesdays (This week Saturday and Wednesday) after school got to learn more, and play some Halloween games in class. I read them a couple Halloween stories, and they played a monster match-em game.

This week was the beginning of the Parent teacher meetings (Or parent teacher conferences in Canada). We had an average of 3 parents a day on Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday. We have had a good time discussing each child and looking at their books. At this time it is ok for parents or teachers to raise any concerns they have about the child. This has been interesting to implement, because the standard Chinese way of doing these things (Which has always driven me crazy) is the whole class’s parents arrive on 1 day and the teachers talk at the parents, who are expected to sit, and be quiet. Then they go home. There is no interaction, there is no looking over the work together to discuss difficulties. We are trying to form a partnership with parents and that means both sides (Inside school, and outside) must work together for the best educational plan for each child.

This week the local government came to our school. They have been videoing at least 1 class from every program in every private school in the Chaoyang area. This was not what I expected. They didn’t video a whole lesson, but 5 minutes of a lesson, then they asked to do the same for a Chinese lesson. It seemed a bit impractical to me, but if it makes our school look good in the eyes of the local government, you have to do it.

We spent the preparation time for the video rearranging the class, and the students loved it. We now have our class library carpet down. (It arrived last year and I have been trying to figure out where to put it since.) We have a really nice library set up at the back and our toothbrush center and other supplies have been organized better. I love it, the kids have adapted well to it.

This week was our first “Mommy Lunch” from the new program. What a “Mommy lunch” is, is every Friday, we let a couple parents into the school to cook up something special for the class. This week (Being the first week) we had 6 chefs. Farrel’s Mother, Amy’s mother, Mickey’s mother, Zack’s mother, Fifi’s mother, and Felix’s mother. They cooked up a wonderful lunch for us that had lollipop and flower shaped breads, shrimp, fish and a lot of other delicious food. The kitchen classroom looked like a fancy dining hall from a hotel or restaurant. They had nice music playing, and the kids loved it. I got jokingly called a King by 2 different teachers. Other staff and students who wandered by the room gawked as they looked in in surprise.

On Friday Morning, George’s mother donated some books to the class library. They were all nice looking books and the children were quite excited to dig into them during reading time.

We had a class on how to use some of the functions of Raz-Kids in computer class. Including how to record the stories and send them off to me. What a “flight check” was and what to do in it. The kids were surprised to find out that I can listen to their stories from home when they read them. They thought this was just great, and some of them tried to send me stories from in class.

Today, the last day I will write about this week, even though it is Sunday again, we went to see Disney on Ice. Nearly the whole class went. We were joined by my family and our Director, Ms. Peng’s youngest daughter as well. It was awesome. We sang our songs on the bus to practice, when we got there, there was 3 layers of security. We had people check our tickets to get into the courtyard of the arena, another group of people verifying our tickets were real just to go up the stairs, (with little scanners), then someone receiving the tickets at the top of the stairs where we went through metal detectors and x-ray machines. At this point all of us found a place to eat. We found some chairs to sit at and pulled out our lunches. It’s strange because at arenas like this in Canada and America there is a concession stand or food booths. We didn’t see any of those. We saw a lot of Disney toys being sold (At 5 times regular store price) but no food or drink sold. When we got in, our seat were up far away from the ice, but shortly after the show started some people from the arena invited our class to move much closer to the ice to see better, that was nice of them.

Tomorrow is the start of a new school week, so I will leave you all to rest. I hope you enjoyed this week, even though it was long, and I will see you in the morning.