March 6

Well, it's the last week here. The time went by so fast. It seems like I just got here! We've started this week, busy as usual. Yesterday I started the day by giving some students their National Reading Assessments. They all passed which is really good. We then did some interpreting poems. I read the students some poems and they had to try and decide what it was about and make some connections. We then had snack and Shake til Break and then maths. For maths, we did Maths Masterpieces, which basically brings art into math in the form of a puzzle. They are given a famous painting, with the pieces mixed up, and they have to do various problems and put them in the right order in order to put the picture together properly. They seemed to really like this. I gave each student a different picture because I felt that they all have different things that they need to work on individually. During this time, I also worked with Dylan, the one who has to do a re-take of his Maths National Assessment. We just basically did some review problems and went over things that he still didn't feel confident with. I will be giving him his re-take tomorrow. After lunch, we focused on Peru. The students were given general information on Peru and they then were able to present it any way they felt was relevant to them. Some made mind maps while others wrote it in a report. If they had time before the end of the day they worked on their Peru art. Today we started out with P.E. and then following that I helped some students with their National Maths Assessments. We then went outside for Shake til Break (which was really a hard workout today!!) and then we came back worked on our pen pal letters and some worked on their own poetry books. We didn't finish all the letters so we'll probably be working on them tomorrow again. By the time we were through with that it was already lunchtime! I really don't know where the time goes! This afternoon we began our Peru artwork and it's going great!! The kids are really enjoying themselves and are making good progress. I really like how this project is going because we've put the responsibility on the kids to learn what they want to learn. They understand this responsibility and have been getting a lot out of it. Tomorrow will much of the same as today except we have swimming in the morning. This week is going by so fast!!

This weekend was a very relaxing one. Saturday we went to Berwick, Eyemouth, and Coldingham Sands. Here we went to see the North Sea and some beaches. It was beautiful. I was surprised to see so many surfers out though. We then went back to Berwick to do some grocery shopping for the tea that we made on Sunday. It didn't turn out as we would have liked but everyone said it was really good. To us, it tasted a lot like chili but no one else thought so. I don't think they have a lot of the same ingredients that we do back at home. We also made puppy chow and that was a huge success! Everyone loved it! This week is going to be spent planning the rest of my lessons and packing. I started packing this weekend and it's not going so well. I've packed one suitcase so far and it's so heavy. I've accumulated a lot of things in the short 2 months that I've been here. I'm not looking forward to packing my last suitcase.