Geocaching!!

So this was a VERY busy week at school.  I have started teaching my communication lessons, writing paragraphs, and the best part of the week I taught my students how to geocache!!

It was SO much fun.  For those of you who don't know, geocaching is like treasure hunting with a GPS unit.  There are "caches" hidden all over the world and you enter their coordinates into the GPS.  Then you set off to find them.  I taught my students how to use the GPS and then sent them on a 6 cache mission that I had set up around the school.  At each cache they found a slip of paper with a word on it.  When they were all compete the words spelt out "How does geocaching relate to communication?"  Not only were they SUPER motivated and excited to do the geocaching they also had a lot of great reflections on how it relates to communication, including pointing out a lot of team working strategies and skills they used.  It was one of the those great, what I like to call, "teacher moments" (a time when you think to yourself "yep this is why I want to be a teacher.)  I finished up the geocaching fun by finding five geocaches today with my host family.  At the first one I placed our class trackable who will hopefully be making his way to Paris cache by cache.

With everything going on it's hard to believe that we've reached the half way point in our experience here.  Part of me feels like I just got here and part of me feels like I have been here forever.  It has already been a challenging experience.  Some days have been harder than others but they have all been beneficial in one way or another.  The coming weeks are sure to prove to be even more challenging but hopefully just as rewarding.