Arepas and Fall Crafts

This week has been pretty uneventful. I haven't been feeling too great, but I'm definitely feeling better than I did earlier in the week. All week we've done a lot of stuff in pre-k having to do with the fall season and Johnny Appleseed (Since Thursday was his birthday.) The kids were crazy and exhausting this week for some reason, but we got to do some fun crafts and things.

We made these really pretty stained-glass type leaves with tissue paper, brown construction paper and contact paper. Sometimes I'm creative.

Changed how centers work since my class as grown. Clearly it's working pretty well, they're all sitting down doing what they're supposed to.

Watching a movie on Johnny Appleseed. I can not wait until I have my projector so I don't need to keep trying to move everyone to my computer whenever I want to show a five minute video.

Celebrating Johnny Appleseed's birthday by tasting some apples.

Mmm. Enjoying our apples. The kids didn't like the apple skins to much through.

Cutting out apples and leaves and practicing sorting them into correct categories. We've been working on our cutting skills quite a bit.

We haven't done anything else too exciting in class, but for my master's degree class I had to put together a presentation to teach the class about a vocabulary word that they wouldn't know. (Our unit right now is vocabulary instruction) I did my presentation on arepas and Dereek came over and helped me cook/film the process for the project. Here's some pictures from our adventure making arepas. We had tried two other times but the electricity had went out so it didn't work. 

Cutting up the plantains to put in our arepas

Avacado

Making the dough for arepas

Trying to cook in my little tiny kitchen. This is all the counter space I have. I also had no cabinets minus what you can see and the sink is literally the size of that plate that is next to it. I have since gained a kitchen table and some shelves though and it's making my life much easier. Time to start decorating. =)

Frying our plantains.

The delicious finish product. 

One other fun little picture. I went out for my morning run a couple days ago and about halfway around the track I tripped over this little kitten. It was cute and meowed so I pet it for a minute. I tried to keep running but it followed me. It wouldn't leave me alone and was obviously hungry so I let it follow me back to my house and I gave it some milk and chicken. I was at school all day and had workers in my house so I couldn't keep it inside. I don't know where he/she went to, but it was adorable for the morning!

Cute little kitten.

Not too much else to report. Dereek and I went to the market again this morning. Got some food and juice from the same person that we did two weeks ago. He asked if we'd be here next week (which we will be) and said that if we come back he'd make our pineapple juice into a pineapple cocktail. Sounds like a good way to start the morning. We will be in Anaco on Saturday, but next Sunday we leave to go to Trinidad and Tobago for a week to renew our visas. Definitely excited to leave the country, travel and relax for a bit. Only one week!! We also looked into booking our trip to Angel Falls for Thanksgiving break. Theres 7 or 8 of us going so they're going to give us a discount. I haven't been into the jungle since being in Ecuador so I'm very excited about that!

Also, for all you New Girl fans, my friend Erin is downloading all the newest seasons of shows so last night I was able to watch the newest New Girl. I will never stop loving Schmidt. He is the absolute best part of that show. I miss watching it all together though before going to out Trivia Night. xo

Playa Puinare and Senses

This weekend Erin, Heather, Dereek and I went to Puerto La Cruz and took a boat out to a little island off the coast on Saturday. We all got into Puerto La Cruz on Saturday night and stayed at the school's beach house. We got up early-ish on Saturday to get a cab to go to where the boats leave from. It was nice having Dereek because he translated everything for us and was our tour guide. It was about a 20 minute boat boat ride and we reached a beautiful island with clear blue water. We did a little bit of exploring around the island and I got some awesome pictures. It was a fairly uneventful but relaxing day. The one bit of adventure was that I lost my earring when I jumped off the dock. Dereek found it though! I was pretty impressed, definitely didn't believe him when he said he'd use Heather's goggles and find it. I'm glad he proved me wrong. I'll let the pictures do the rest of the talking about our weekend. They're pretty awesome.

The view of Puerto La Cruz when we were leaving on the boat.

Arriving at Playa Puinare

Crystal clear water

The view of the beach we were at.

View from higher up while Dereek and I were hiking

Top of the island.

Playa Puinare from the top of the island

Pretty colored water looking towards other beaches on the other side of the island

Dereek and some pretty awesome looking water

Just liked the clear water and the boat together. So tropical.

Dereek and I went exploring a bit.

There were these three cool vulture type birds that would swoop really close to us and you could hear the wind through their wings.

Looking at the beach from the water. (I love having a water proof camera)

Playa Puinare

Underwater pictures! Me, Heather, and Erin

Dereek and Heather

Normal picture of friends. Heather, Dereek, Me

Never taking a normal picture. Erin, Dereek and I

It was a bit of a cold boat ride back and we got sprayed with quite a bit of water that left us soaked. Dereek, Erin, Heather and I.

Just some fun videos and pictures from today with the kids next. We finished our unit on the five senses so today we reviewed all of them by having a center for each sense. The kids enjoyed it. It was really kind of loud and crazy though. They definitely know their senses though!

Looking at my "beach" that I created to use to talk about our sense of touch.

My fake "beach" Though there is sand and 

The kids touching everything at the "beach"

The beginning of our sounds stations. Sebastian and Marian using the "hearing" station that had musical instruments for them to use.

Carol and Martina at the tasting center where I let them taste things like honey, soy sauce, mustard and lemon juice. Got some good reactions.

For the smell center I found these cool scented markers to let them draw with and let them use scratch and sniff stickers to create drawings that they could smell.

Luis using my colored lenses at the sight center.

Michelle smelling my awesome markers.

I kept the "beach" at the touch station.

At the touch station I also had some play dough. Luis told me he made me an empanada. Usually kids in the US would make a cake or cookie; here they make an empanada.

Fun Things!

THIS IS GOING TO BE A LONG ONE! =)

Before the fun things I thought I'd share a few things that have happened here revolving around the wildlife that we can really only say "Only in Venezuela." First off, in case I haven't mentioned, I think I have to yell at the kids to "leave the iguanas alone" on a daily basis. I also have a tendency to almost step on them when they are laying out and I'm walking home and not paying attention. Next, Erin (the grade one teacher) got stung by a scorpion a few days ago while she was sleeping. She felt a pinch, got out of bed, looked at her leg, tried to look under the covers then saw a scorpion crawling out. Here's her pictures of the thing just hanging out on her kitchen floor:

Luckily they're not worse than a bee sting and not poisonous, but still very scary to see! I also had a huge spider in my house a couple days ago. I've gotten pretty good with them, but even my director said "I can't kill something this big, I feel like it's murder." So he used a cup and paper, caught it and let it go outside. Though he did jump quite a bit when the cup moved and the spider was free while he was holding it. Here is my spider:

He doesn't look too bad, but I swear he was big and quite the surprise to find in my bedroom. All other creatures have been quite pleasant. I continue to need to shake out my shoes to make sure that no geckos are hiding in them, watch the owls every morning while I run and have started noticing all the bright green parrots flying around, but those are all pretty cool things.

Everything around here has been pretty good. Typical days of school and the kids are adorable. They've gotten really good at counting so we've started playing number bingo. The kids really love it. We've also gotten good at recognizing colors and their English is definitely improving.  We learned about different colors and did some finger painting to mix primary colors and make others. Check out the mess we made:

After we mixed our colors I kinda just let them go crazy and make an absolute mess.

We've also been learning about the letter F so we made these really cool fish out of the letter F:

Most importantly, I've gotten tired of our same routing. We're on day number 29 of school so I thought we'd change it up in celebration of learning the letter F and finishing our family unit. This morning we had a "Feast with our Families." All the kids brought their "favorite" foods to share with the class and we ate and made cool family trees with our families. It lasted for about an hour this morning and worked really well. I think the parents enjoyed being able to spend the morning working with their kids. We also made cute cards for our families yesterday and learned the poem that was written inside that said "some families are large, some families are small but I love my family, best of all" and presented our families with the cards. This was what the morning looked like (kinda hectic but tons of fun and the family trees came out AWESOME)

These are the cards we made for our families. They're flowers (letter f) made with their handprints.

My gorgeous cooking abilities. Fruit and Fudge for the Families (Keeping with my F theme) Totally took full advantage of the fact that the school would reimburse me for anything I bought.

The kids and their families working on the family trees. We did it at the tables outside since my classroom is tiny and I didn't want a mess in there.

Marcel and his mom

Carol and her mom

Look how cute they all look hung up! They made for such a great classroom decoration

Michelle's family tree, simple and gorgeous

Martina's family tree. I love that she included her dog. I got to learn so much about all of them, like Martina's dog's name is Simon. It was definitely nice to talk to the kids and their parents and look at all their pictures. I had made one too so they saw pictures of my family as well. 

After our Family Feast we had a kind of crazy day. Our crafts and food took up a lot of table space which made working hard and it was challenging to clean up with all the kids still there. We were successful though. I was tired and we were leaning about the sense of smell, so I decided to take them outside to smell flowers since we have so many beautiful flowers. It was relaxing and fun just smelling them and picking them and putting them in our hair. Not quite as education as most of the stuff I've done, but we don't have school tomorrow so today is kind of like Friday and I was tired. It also gave me some great pictures (especially since the kids took my camera and took a bunch of me)

Marian

Smelling the purple flowers

Luis

Martina. I told them just to smell and not to touch, that didn't work out so well. Thank goodness we have tons of flowers everywhere.

My class, two were out today (Hakim and Sebastian) Standing from left to right: Luis, Marcel, Carol, Michelle, Kenvi. Bottom from left to right: Marian, Arya, Martina

Carol and I were matching with our white flowers

Arya, me and Michelle

Me, Michelle and Marian

Thanks to the kids stealing my camera and Luis taking pictures of everything I got a few pictures of what the school grounds look like too just for fun.

This is the entrance of the school.

The field between the school and our homes where the kids have recess

That's about all for now. I'll probably have another long post on Sunday. Tomorrow is an in service day then right after school we're leaving for Puerto La Cruz. Me, Erin, Heather and Dereek are going to be there all weekend. On Saturday we're going to take a ferry to one of the little Caribbean islands. Get some crystal blue water, perfect sandy beaches and some good food. Nice relaxing weekend. Very much needed when we all teach kids under the age of 7. Then on Monday I'm having a "fall day" with the kids to teach them about the seasons so I should have lots of pictures from that too.