Busy, busy, busy...

Hello All!

So I haven't written on here in awhile but that is because there has been SO much happening.  I'm beginning to do almost full control in the classroom this week.  So that means I have been putting a lot of time into preparing and creating lessons.  I'm really excited for the inquiry subject I will begin teaching this week on communication.  It will run throughout the rest of my time here.  As part of this unit I will be teaching the students about geocaching and actually setting up a geocaching route around the school.  I hope this all goes well and I know the students are really going to enjoy getting out and using some new technology.

I am also about to start teaching how to write paragraphs.    To do this I have decided to incorporate the subject of communication by organizing a monster exchange with the kindergarten class back at Sunnyside that I was teaching before coming here.  A monster exchange is when one class (my New Zealand one) draws a monster and then uses words to describe that monster (hence how I'm going to use it to teach how to write a paragraph).  Then you send the words describing the monster to another school/class (the Sunnyside kindergarten class).  That class then redraws the monster using only the clues they get from the words and then sends the redrawn monster back to the original class to compare.   I haven't attempted it yet but I am going to introduce the concept tomorrow.

So that's school, I'm settling in, loving my kids and learning a lot.  But with a lot of hard work during the week comes the chance to have some fun on the weekend and that's what I did this weekend.

This weekend all three of us girls went to Rotorua.  There we explored the Redwoods forest, did some shopping and my favorite had a cultural experience night to learn more about the Maori culture.  It was wonderful.  We got a great meal, learned about their customs, clothing, weapons, dances and how they keep their culture, language, and heritage in the ever changing "modern" world.  But wait the weekend doesn't end there because I left out the first thing we did on our Rotorua weekend...

BUNGY JUMP!! That's right, I paid someone to strap a giant rubber band to my feet and then jumped off a perfectly good platform 47 meters over a river.  To say it was a rush and a trill would be an understatement but I'm not really quite sure how else to describe it.  Well that's it for now I need to get back to planing lessons for the next couple of weeks...