School

Today went pretty well. I played games in all my classes this morning. I give God glory and thank Him for going before me and preparing the way.

In 6th grade, I played a game where you put the flashcards up on the black board and without letting the kids see, you write a point behind the card. When the kid says the card correctly, they are allowed to remove the card and their team gets whatever is written on the board. I have played this game before and it has gone pretty well. They seem to enjoy it. This time I changed it up a little and drew a camera behind one of the cards. When the kids picked the card, I got to take their picture. Yay for me!

In 5th grade I played the same game. At first the kids were a little bored but once they realized there were other things besides just numbers behind the cards, they got a little more into it. This class is one of my more difficult classes. Perhaps even my most difficult class. But for the last two or three weeks, God has given me an extra amount of creativity and grace to go in there. I pray that He will continue and that He would let His love shine through me to them.

In 4th grade I played fruit basket upset. This is where you divide the class into about 4 teams and name each team one of the flash cards. Then, one person is "it" and calls out a flash card. The team with that card must all get up and switch seats. "It" must quickly find a seat. This went well. They really enjoyed the game. We also played with one flashcard being the wild card. If the child said it, then the entire class had to switch seats. Sometimes it is not good to have a wild card if you have a lot of students in the classroom, but for this class, I only had about 13 kids so it wasn't too bad.

In 3rd grade I played fruit basket upset again. This is, by far, the favorite game of this class. However, they have a tendency to argue. So, with about 10 minutes left on the clock, I had to stop the game because they weren't getting along. We ended up spending the last few minutes playing a guessing game where they had to guess which card I was holding. Despite the arguments, 3rd grade went well also. After class, I had fun taking pictures of the kids and playing "paper, scissors, stone!" with them. That is the ultimate problem solver in Taiwan.

At my afternoon school, my teacher asked me to read a children's book in the class. The book was called "You Guai Shou! You Guai Shou!" "Have a Monster! Have a Monster." It was basically about someone asking if different shadows were the monster. But when you turned over the flap, it wasn't a monster, it was just a little kid dressed up as a cowboy, or an astronaut or a princess, or a mouse, or a cat. They had fun guessing what the shadows really were.

So I read the book twice to my 3rd and 4th graders. It went really well, and at the end, he gave them some worksheets for them to do. They had to draw a picture of a monster and tell how many eyes, hands, legs, mouths, noses, etc. it had.

After all my classes were over, a couple of my 5th and 6th graders came up to me and asked me if I wanted to play a game. I said sure. So, they linked their arms in mine and we walked down the hall. I tried to get them to tell me what game we were going to play but they wouldn't. I was starting to get a little nervous...perhaps they were taking me somewhere where they could play a trick on me...I have had some students do that and it wasn't fun. But I had no reason to fear. For I soon saw that we were headed to the ping pong tables. I am not particularly good at ping pong, but it was nice to know that I wasn't that much worse than my kids. We spent the next 10 minutes letting the ball fly back and forth. Then the bell rang and they had to go to class.

Later this evening, I had Chinese class. I am, by far, not the smartest one in the class, but I do enjoy it. After class, Jarita and I went to the nearby Gym and played some more ping pong. We played three games and she won three times. I told you I was bad at it. It was still a lot of fun and I hope to have a rematch sometime within the next 17 days before she goes home. I am gonna miss her and Dominique so much!

Well, I am going to quite this post before it starts getting sappy...I know it was pretty boring, but I just felt like typing and this was the first thing that came to mind to do. Now, I am going to bed because I have to get up at six tomorrow morning to go back to Little Kinmen and teach 6 more classes.

~Smiles :o)