The Game of Hangman!

I feel like I should write more about life here, but the truth is, life has just been "same ol' same ol'" lately. And I'm not sure how much I've already written. I'm LOVING teaching the third and fourth grade kids. And I enjoy the second graders when they are behaving. My kids are just so, so good.

I realized recently that my first graders have learned enough letters now to play Hangman, and boy do they love it. I think it's good for them too, because even once they've guessed what the word is, I still make them say the letters to spell it. The other day they figured out m-o-n-k-?-y. They knew the word was "monkey" and kept chanting it, but I made them guess the last letter. It was so cute as they shot their little hands in the air, so excited and confident that they just knew what that last letter was as I prompted them saying "monkEEEEEE." And then I felt terrible as I shot them down after they screamed letters like "Q" and "L" confidently! They didn't understand the part where I was drawing a stick figure, but that's okay. We had fun anyway.

My second graders on the other hand get very worried as I continue to draw the stick figure. But I don't like to let them lose because I want them to get the words. So after completing the stick figure including hands, feet, and ears, I go on to draw shorts and a t-shirt which always makes the class laugh because they thought it was over.

I also discovered how to make memory on PPT. This comes in handy as you can't buy note cards ANYWHERE in this country. (okay I exaggerate. on this province... maybe that's an exaggeration too, but seriously, people here don't even know what note cards are. Even at Carrefour!) Unfortunately, I can't figure out how to get just the last two cards picked to reappear. So if they get one card wrong they have to start over. I felt bad about it in the beginning and thought the kids would get frustrated with it being too difficult. Boy was I wrong. They LOVE it. And I write the words "up, down, left, right" on the board and make them use their words now instead of hand gestures to tell me which boxes to click on. I'm really impressed with how well it's worked. And I can switch up the words every week to their new vocab words. So great! I can't believe I didn't discover this before!

As for work outside of teaching, it's been pretty fun. I spend pretty much every day at the school from 8am-6pm, so there's not a whole lot of leisure time spent. I ate sushi for breakfast last week which was a pretty cool event. Apart from that I spend my days browsing our street, sweeping the dust out of our apartment (the dust here is seriously insane, AND we're on the 9th floor!), and watching TV shows/movies on my laptop. And, that's pretty much it. Hope this does well for an update!