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.