My children!!

I have now been teaching for four weeks!! I still have no books for 9th or 10th grade. Hopefully customs will let them through soon. I am starting to feel slightly more on top of things (some days anyway). I wanted to introduce all of you to my home room class, 7th grade. I have them for devotionals and Earth Science 4 days a week. They are all sweet in their own way and I do love them, but when you put 10 boys and 5 girls into a small classroom they have so much energy and ideas for mischief. I am rapidly learning that their is a wide gap between what works to teach a 10th grade class and what works for 7th graders. I have 1 student from Germany, 2 from Canada, and the rest are all born and breed in Jarabacoa. It is interesting to have such a mixture of second language learners. We are working together to make our classroom a productive, fun, safe and godly place. If any of you have words of wisdom on teaching middle school boys, I would love to hear them. I am always surprised by how many lessons are universal. For example, not poking your neighbor is something I have to tell Kindergartens and seventh graders alike. I hope and pray that I can be the teacher that this class needs me to be and that we can learn to trust each other and have more meaningful times learning about science and about God.

La Cucaracha

I thought I should share some of my more entertaining stories with you all. Have you ever heard that cute kids song "La cucaracha, la cucaracha, ya no puede caminar......" I always thought that was such a fun song--that is until I recently realized it was about cockroaches. I always wanted to live closer with nature, but I never planned on living with so many bugs. I think I have killed 5 cockroaches a week on average. I felt slightly hesitant to kill them until I found one sitting on the toilet seat staring at me, waving it's little antennaes at 1 in the morning. I think the prevalence of bugs explains why everyone always wears flip flops in their houses. You need a flip flop handy to wack at the bugs. I have now mastered the wack of death---one strike and the roaches are done for. It's a small achievement I know, but it's one step forward for Emily and one strike against the roaches! I thought I would include a picture of my most recent conquest......