One Month

I've now officially been in Venezuela for one month. Time has gone by extremely fast and I am starting to get very busy. I will not be updating as often as I have been, more important stuff to do. I'm not only teaching pre-k and writing, but I also have to coordinate the writing tests, tutor Monday, Tuesday, Thursday and Friday afterschool, run a club on Wednesday after school and get all my work for my grad school courses done. I'll be busy all day, everyday. My goal is to keep my weekends fairly free though so I can enjoy them. This past Saturday we went out to a club. Nothing like going out at home, it was very small, but definitely fun. Got home very late and slept a lot on Sunday. Sunday was also the beginning of real work for grad school so I tried to print and gather all my readings that I knew I had to do this week. The workload for these first two weeks is pretty significant, but the professor said it does get less as it goes on. Definitely using my time management skills. Thank god I'm happy when I'm busy.

As for pre-k they've been pretty good this week. I'm starting to crack down on discipline now because they've been here long enough to know my basic classroom rules and commands in English. Being ESL is not going to be an excuse for not behaving anymore. This week we've been learning about the letter Dd. The kids are doing AWESOME with their letters. They always tell me "d is for duck, and dinosaur and drum." I also try to review the other letters we've done so they don't forget their sounds and what words begin with them. I really am seeing a huge improvement in their understanding already. I think they will just get more and more fun to teach as their comprehension improves. We also started to learn about the senses. (Starting to incorporate science and social studies now that it's September) We used our senses to determine what two "mystery powders" were. (They were salt and sugar) We also went outside and used our senses to help us determine what was around us.

Today after school we have our club. Our Random Act of Kindness for this week is making cupcakes for all the staff members. Heather and I went and got the cupcakes and materials last night, we're going to decorate them with the kids after school. (We also got some extras for them to eat) Also sometime really really soon I need to get some candy and prizes for my preschoolers, some have filled up their sticker charts already! Which is awesome, but it means I need to go shopping.

Here's some pictures from the past few days.

Reading our book about senses.

My kids using their sense of smell to see if they could figure out what my mystery items were.

Using our sense of touch. (I wish I had a picture of when they tasted the salt. Their faces were amazing. They did really like the sugar though and I had to take it away because they wanted to just sit there and eat it all. I didn't need nine 4-year-olds hyped up on sugar...)

Using our senses outside. We used magnifying glasses to help us see better.

The kids are getting really good at their numbers and counting. Here they are working on number puzzles. They enjoy it and it lets me see how well they know the numbers we've gone over. I really care mostly that they can count up to 30 or so by the end of this year, but if they could do more I'd be extremely pleased.

We made these dogs for our letter Dd today. One little boy, Luis, was even smart enough to tell me they looked like dalmatians. I asked him what letter dalmatian started with and he correctly said d! So proud.