hola! k dad thinks I'm going A crowd so I'm telling you guys what I do everyday! The night before each day we get all of our teaching supplies ready in a bin.
Each week er have a different subject we teach. The subjects are Arts and Crafts, Kitchen, Shop, Drama, Games, and Gym. I'm doing arts and crafts rn and it is the best thing ever. In the other subjects the kids just run wild but with arts and crafts they like to make stuff so they pay attention to what I say it's the best.
I wake up at 6:15 press snooze and then get up at 6:24 and go running to the beach and back with two other girls in my group. It's about 2.5 miles so it's a good little course! Then I'll rinse off bc SOOO sweaty in this humidity even in the morning!
After I read the scriptures, say prayers, eat breakfast (I've been eating cereal which I haven't eaten in forever... it's SO good) and then get ready for teaching.
We put all our stuff in plastic bins, so we carry those to school at like 9:40 and get there by 9:55 ish so we can teach at 10.
The kids are like straight animals. They punch and kick and wrestle each other it's crazy. A kid in America trips and falls down on grass and starts crying. Kids here are like made out of stele I'm not kidding. I don't think I've seen one kid cry and they hurt each other soo bad.
But so at 10-10:20 we do opening with all the kids in my group of five teachers. So me and five teachers have all our kids in a classroom and one of us leads the opening. We sing about five songs and 4 out of 5 of the songs is five little monkeys. They LOVE that one. It's so fun and I like it because it takes a long time and it gets all their wiggles out.
Then we break up into our groups. We each have nine kids in each group and usual two teachers share a room while teaching so it gets a little crazy. We have three rotations and each rotation is 30 minutes. So if you have one of the bad groups it makes the 30 minutes feel like an hour.
When we teach we tell them to only speak English but they totally don't. You give them tickets for every time they say a phrase that you pick to work on for that day. So like if the concept I want them to understand is them having something, I will give them a marker and then say "You have a marker. Can you say I have a marker?" and then the kid will say "I have marker." and then I give them a ticket. And then all the kids will see that he is getting a ticket so they all say "Have marker". They are like the seagulls on finding Nemo when they say "Mine. Mine. " It's freaking funny.
My hardest thing here is being mean to the kids. They will do something bad and I'm like getting mad and then they do something and I start laughing and it totally defeats the whole purpose of me getting mad but I'm such a laugher. For the most part they like me but when I start to raise my voice I think they get afraid of me. Probably not but I like to think so. I sound EXACTLY like mom when I say "No" in a mean voice. It freaks me out.
At the end of the last rotation we have a thing called store. And so we count up all the tickets that each kid has and depending on how many tickets they get to pick a prize. They love it. But if they were misbehaving in class they don't get to do store so that's supposed to be their motivation to do well in class. I've only told one kid they can't have store and she flipped me off and punched a kid and ran out of the classroom so I locked the door behind her. She is physco.
So we are doing that till 12 and then we are supposed to eat lunch at the school but I swerve so hard. Think of the gross elementary school lunches in the US and then it's like the gross quality of that with the gross food here. So I come home and eat and apple or something like that! Then we have to go back to 2 and do it all over again until 4.
Our morning class is so so so crazy and they are the older kids like 7 or 8. And then our afternoon class is SO CUTE. I die over all of them. So the afternoon is nice!
And then we walk back to our house and our cooking lady,Tamarse, is making dinner. Every meal is a variation of rice and some sort of meat that freaks me. Some days it's good but other days I just stick to my frozen corn and peas that I have bought or I eat and apple and peanut butter. While dinner is being made some of us go to the beach for a while or go walk around or get stuff ready for the next day or come up with more lessons.
We have to come up with 5 lessons for the next week by Wednesday before. So today I'm turning in my lesson plans to teach Kitchen next week. Then at night we just talk and laugh, have meetings, play cards, uno, or watch movies.
We have to have the gate outside our house closed by 7 bc the neighborhood we live in is so scary. There is like a prostitution house a down the street from us hahaha it's sos crazy. so the nights will get pretty boring after four months. But so far it's been ok! I feel like my life here is so normal. Like I don't feel like I should be in Provo going to school or anything.
It makes me happy being here. I look around on my way to school and just feel so so so blessed. Like it is just so crazy to me that we get to live in the nicest houses in the U.S and the people here are literally living in tin shacks. It was raining the other day for like two straight days and this old man was out there, every time I walked by, with a bucket trying to get all the water out of his house so it doesn't flood.
I just am so grateful for everything we have. I love everyone here and all of the people I live with are seriously the nicest. I don't think I could've picked a better group! I love it here and I'm having a lot of fun. It's hard but so fun! I've already been here for three weeks that's weird. But I love you guys so much. Sorry this is the world's longest text
