Moth Massacre

We accidentally left the light on in our house with both of our doors and a few windows open the other night. We had gone on a run/walk and came back and sat outside for a while. When we all decided to head back in, we realized just how many moths and mosquitos had made their way inside. We decided to each grab a newspaper or magazine and just started swatting. It was a pretty hilarious sight as we all attempted to get rid of as many bugs as possible before going to bed, but in the end we just gave up.

My first week is now almost over, and it feels like it is already going by so fast. With our break, we end up only having 6 weeks with the students instead of 8 so it is going to fly by. My kids are awesome. I have 8-9 year olds, which they call year 3/4’s, but it is like our 2nd-3rd grade. I have 26 students and it is a pretty even split between boys and girls. They all think I talk a little funny because their accents are different than ours, but I haven’t run into too much trouble with them understanding me. When they don’t it is usually really cute because they very politely just say, “Pardon me?” Some of our spelling is different as well so I'm always a little worried about making mistakes, especially because I'm not the greatest speller to begin with.

This morning I was able to go watch the Junior KapaHaka group. This is a group that meets with the Maori teacher and they learn songs and dances from the Maori culture. They are all in their language, but the teacher explains what they meant so it was really neat to see. I was surprised by how quickly the kids learned their new song today. One of the other student teachers was able to get a video of this, so I will hopefully be able to add that here too. We also had a Maori language lesson today where they learn many of the words and then learned a legend about a giant and a beautiful girl.

The kids are really great for the most part, but I will have a few challenging ones. Not unlike any other classroom though. I had my first experience with having duty during interval. Interval is like our recess time except all of the students go out and play at the same time and there are 2 teachers that have duty. It still seems strange to me how only 2 teachers are able to keep an eye on 300 students, but it does seem to work. The kids usually play cricket or rugby at interval, both of which I don’t know the rules of, but I’m trying to pick up on some of it.

I shared an alphabet book about myself with the students today and let them ask me several questions about my life. They were very interested in a lot of the pages and wanted to know what my favorite of everything was and why I liked certain things. One of my pages included how I like to watch storms especially big lightning/thunderstorms. My picture on that page was just a simple picture of some lightning, but when I showed it they were all amazed. Apparently they have some thunder every once in a while but never the big, branching lightning. After that they wanted to know all about them and tornadoes and if I was scared of them. I told them that I’ve never really been scared, but my sister Joy is and so we used to always tell her that tornadoes were coming and she would freak out and start crying. They thought this was pretty funny.

My teacher is really funny and uses a lot of humor in his classroom. The kids all respond to him really well. They seem to really enjoy being in his classroom, which is fun to see. I have noticed that some of the things he says with the students wouldn’t probably be acceptable in Iowa, such as talking about students who have gotten in trouble at interval in front of everyone. We usually don’t do this so that the child isn’t embarrassed in front of the whole class, but they just talk about it at a group and its not too big of a deal.

Everything is really pretty similar so it has been fairly easy to catch on to what he does with his teaching. I was able to take one reading group today and am taking over one next week as well. I’m very excited to start doing more in the classroom because a lot of it has been just observing right now.