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.