Halloween

      After all the days off in October, this month is going to seem really long until Thanksgiving. This week was really long, but I don't think much teaching happened. I had several special conferences with parents of students who need attention or extra practice. Wednesday, the school had an early out which gave the teachers time to work on rubrics for authentic assessments, to upload curriculum onto computer software, and decide on what songs the Kindergarteners would sing for the Christmas concert.


I am "power ranger"

      Halloween was a crazy day! We didn't get much instruction accomplished, because the kids were in their costumes all day. Pre-K and Nursery came trick-or-treating to our room. At noon, all of Kindergarten went to the court to parade around in their costumes for parents to admire and take pictures. I had lots of characters in my room including Captain America, Wonder woman, 2 Batmans, Flash, 2 Ironman, Star Wars characters, and princesses. The afternoon was filled with trading candy and trying to make sure the kids left will all parts of their costumes.



I am "Captain America"



I am "Cinderella"

       Friday was all day parent teacher conferences where I showed the parents report cards, evaluation results, writing samples, and discussed behavior issues. Starting at 7:30am, I had 14 conferences before lunch. The afternoon was much lighter, with only 4 conferences though two needed translators. Overall, I think they went pretty well as the parents mostly told me that their children were beginning to understand more of my English! Also, Ms. Cuty returns next week!
     
At home, we had a visitor for the first part of the week, Heather. She is a friend of Stacey's, visiting Tegus to apply for residency. It was nice to have someone new around to talk with and gave us an excuse to eat out. Stacey also cooked dinner at the neighbour's and we had dinner with a couple friends from the embassy. Frances has been organizing evening games of Ultimate Frisbee with light-up disks. It is a lot of fun and good exercise. Unfortunately, about the middle of the week I started coming down with a cold so my weekend has been spent in bed, sleeping and munching on some pineapple from the market.