Peace Day and EVAC

The past few days have been super eventful and wonderful (for the most part). I'm going to just complain for a few sentences, then all the wonderfulness will come in. OUR RUNNING WATER HASN'T BEEN WORKING CONSISTENTLY ALL WEEK!! That means, no showers, flushing toilets, doing laundry, washing dishes, aka gross. The water has been on and off all week. What is also miserable is that when we do have water, I have no hot water because there is a giant rusted hole in the bottom of my water heater so all the water just pours out the bottom instead of getting hot and going into my house. Marcelo is in Miami at a conference, hopefully when he gets back all this will be sorted out.

Now that that's out of my system, Thursday was international Peace Day. We celebrated as a school by having everyone wear white and taking a giant picture in the shape of a peace sign outside. We lined up on some chalked out lines and J went up the water tower to take this awesome pictures:

For most of the morning kindergarten took their time creating drawings and sentences to finish "To celebrate international peace day I am going to..." What they came up with was very cute. We glued them on a giant piece of white paper, put our handprints, signed our names and stuck the whole thing up behind the stage area. As the day went on all the other grades added their peace day projects and by the end it looked awesome with everyones work. 

Kindergarten Peace Day Picture I

Kindergarten Peace Day Picture II

Working on our group project

haha peace Kenvi

Peace Arya and Carol

Dominick working hard

Kindergarten Peace Day Picture III

For international peace day Marian is going to "sher mi dog wet Carol" aka Share my ddog with Carol.

Marcel is going to "pla soprheros wif Hakim" aka play superheroes with Hakim.

I don't have a picture of the wall with everyone's work, but this is kindergarten, pre-k 4 and first grade.

The past few days have also been wonderful because Friday and today I was at the EVAC (Eastern Venezuela Athletic Conference) Teacher's Conference. It was great to meet some other international teachers working in Venezuela and see the international school in Puerto. Yesterday I went to some great workshops. One was my a kindergarten teacher and how she uses STEM (science, technology, engineering, math) projects with her students and was really interesting and helpful and I'm looking forward to trying some cool new things with my kinders now. I was impressed that she found a way to use science journals with such young kids and I want to give it a try too. I also went to a section about service learning with projects with ANIA. This is about connecting children with their environment and giving them responsibility. Each child is given a plot of land that must have at least three plants (or three potted plants in a room). These plants are the child's responsibility and they take care of one for themselves, one for someone else, and one for the environment. These natural spaces that they create are called TiNis and the children learn to respect them and care for them so they paint signs and decorate these areas as well. The pictures that we were shown that kids were able to do were amazing and I think it really helps children, especially those living in a city, connect with and learn to care for their environment. Check out the website if you're curious to learn more, but it's in Spanish http://mundodeania.org/en Finally, I had also went to a conference about google apps. I never thought about using them, but I've found some pretty cool ones and I really like that these can be used on any type of laptop/tablet/etc not just apple products. I still have a bit of exploring to do in this area, but I think there will be lots of new apps I can use with my students.

Today was #edcampvenezuela and edcamp is an "unconference" where we decide what to talk about and get to choose where we go. It's hard to explain but pretty cool to see in action. The best thing I got out of today was learning how to use twitter in a classroom and for my out personal professional development. I had a twitter but never saw the point of using it, but I was shown so many cool things to follow that relate to my job and will give me good ideas to use in the classroom that now I'm going to be an avid twitter fan. We were also shown how to organize all the incoming tweets using an app so that it helps us filter what is important and relevant to our professional career instead of the "went out for drinks! omg #crazynight" stuff that usually comes up. I also loved that we were told that it was how some of the other schools kept in touch with parents when on field trips. Field trips are challenging to do here because of safety issues and parents are very worried. By using twitter the parents simply followed the school and would be updated every so often by a designated twitter teacher who would post updates and pictures showing that everything was okay and exactly what kids were doing at that moment. I also have now thought of creating a kindergarten twitter so that my kids can tweet what they're learning in class as they're learning it. Kindergarteners can't write anymore then the length of a tweet anyway, so it seems like a great way to get them writing, doing some personal self-reflection on their learning, and keeping their parents informed on daily classroom activities. 

Overall it has been a really great couple of days here and I've gotten to learn a lot!

Venezuelan Rock Music Festival

For once I feel like I've had lots of things to do here. Last weekend Dereek and I, and the other expat teachers all went to the beach for a day. We took a boat out to Puinare (one of the islands we go to) and just hung out, drank beer, and swam. After the beach the other teachers went back to the beach house and Dereek and I stayed at Paseo Colon and looked at some of the artisan vendors work. I bought a nice little painting of Canaima and its not decorating my living along with the much larger painting I bought last year of Juan Griego on Margarita Island. 

This past Saturday (yesterday) was even more awesome. Dereek and I got last minute onto a bus that was going to Puerto La Cruz for a music festival. The bus cost 40 BsF round trip (1 dollar) and took us straight to the place (an hour or so away) and back. There was almost no one on the bus maybe 10-15 people in one of those huge comfy buses, so the trip was nice. 

When we got there there were quite a bit of people already (it was about 2pm) There were vendors selling art and food, murals for us to paint on, and a huge stage that had bands constantly playing throughout the day and night. There were a total of 25 bands playing for the whole festival.

The first thing Dereek and I did was get some food and just sit down and take it all in. It was in a nice little park so there were trees to sit under, benches and lots of grassy area. The park was filled with all different types of people who were there for the festival. There were young people, older people, families, everyone. We had a good time people watching for a while. After a bit we decided we needed some beer, so we took a nice walk around the city to buy some and bring it back. It was a relaxing day where we just had some drinks and listened to some music. 

We also got to do some art. There were big pieces of mural paper and paint that were left free for anyone who wanted to paint on. It was just art for the sake of art and I loved that. I got to have both art and music for a day. It was so nice to be somewhere that had a little bit of culture since Anaco is severely lacking in that area. 

For the rest of the day/evening we just hung out there listening to music, eating food, drinking beer, talking to people, watching some parrots flying around and later some friends of Dereek's came and we got to hang out with them. As the day progressed more and more people came and by the time we left at like 8-830 there were hundreds of people there. 

Getting back was a little annoying though. The bus is a PDVSA bus that these people had rented, and though we were supposed to leave at 9, around 8 we got a call saying PDVSA wanted their bus back and that we had to leave now. We then ended up waiting probably 45 minutes to leave anyway since the bus had the brilliant idea to park on a teeny tiny street that ended up filled with cars of concert goers and couldn't get around the corner because it was too big. They had to find the owner of the car and get them to move it. They got so lucky that it was someone who was in a church nearby, because if it was anyone at the concert they would never have found them. 

When we got back to Anaco it was about 10:30 and down pouring. Dereek and I got dropped off and we had to sprint across the street to Barabicu where a friend (the girlfriend of the owner of the restaurant) was having a birthday party. We got in soaking wet and exhausted, but it was nice to see her for her birthday and I think she appreciated that we came even though we were in PLC and it was pouring out. We ended up getting home at around 12:30 last night. 

view of the beach after hiking up to the top of the island.

Puinare was the most crowded I have seen it. Lots of people on the beach and in the water.

Morley, Dereek and Matt taking in the view.

Mural paper at the music festival 

Anyone can paint anything. I liked that elephant.

Awesome tree. There were a couple good paintings.

Dereek and I aren't particularly awesome painters so we put our handprints.

Our handprints. =)

Listening to one of the bands.

Lots of people. I loved that the stage had palm trees around it too.

This little kid was adorable with blond curly hair and was rocking out on dads shoulders to some pretty intense rock music.

Note the little boy and his dad with their hands up.

Guacamayas! (macaws) this was the first time I had gotten to see them in the wild just flying around. They're always someones pet, but these two guys were just flying around over the park where the concert was.

Dereek and I enjoying some food. We ate wayyy too much while we were there. 

Laura Guevarra. She was our favorite.

She kind of reminded me of a Spanish Florence and the Machine.

Lots of fun to watch. Overall it was a fantastic day and way different then what is usually going on around here. The guy who ran our bus said theres a similar event in Cumana in a month. This one will be overnight and we'll get some beach time. We're definitely considering it. 

New Units!

Now that we're almost a month into school, we're really starting to get into more of the "meat" of our learning. Some routines and expectations are still a struggle, but this is going to be part of kindergarten for the whole year. Personally, I think it's just as important for a kindergartener to learn proper behavior and expectations as it is for them to learn basic information. But, regardless of this, I'm really excited to get into some new information, especially in science and social studies. I've kinda been neglecting these areas a bit in lieu of learning rules, behavior and expectations.

In science we're starting a huge unit on life processes. At  the moment, we're focusing just on things that are living/nonliving, but this will eventually merge into learning about animals, and then plants. We don't finish this whole thing until almost Christmastime. During class we talked about living/nonliving things and how to tell if something is alive or not. We then went on a nature walk outside to look at everything on our campus and try and decide if it is living or not.

In social studies we're beginning to learn about presidents, particularly George Washington at the moment. I'm amazed at how much kids like learning about presidents. Social studies is usually something I think of as a boring subject because there's so much memorization in the upper grades, but my kids love it. They love just sitting around and talking about presidents. Today we read a short story that had George Washington facts then made puppets of George Washington. I was really impressed how much information they retained. Some kids realized GW's birthday was in the same month as theirs and they were ecstatic. While we were making our puppets they were just chatting about GW. It was awesome. Since they had to color him in they were curious what his favorite colors were. Though this is obviously an unanswerable question, it brought up the great question about what the colors of the USA were and why GW might really like these colors. Coloring in GW also let us bring up why his hair should be white, what a wig is, and why he wore them (being from a time a long long time ago and fashion was different.) Who knew we could have this much fun in SS?!

Outside talking about how to tell if something is alive.

My class.

Looking at a flower to decide if its living or not.

More observation.

We found an owl and decided he was living.

George Washington puppets.

Some completed George Washingtons.

Marian and GW.

Kinder with their George Washingtons

it rained when we were supposed to go to the playground yesterday, so we played dress up instead.

We're still learning about silhouettes in art. Today we used warm and cold colors to make dinosaur silhouettes.