Care Package!

 An expatriate's treasure trove. The taste of the abundance of the west! The jerky, the chocolate, the organic ness of it all! How I miss it... Hazelnuts. I miss the cozy cradle of agriculture that is the Willamette valley.

Teaching Wild Classes

"Oh look, I've been impaled" *insane laugh*



This is how I feel during classes where the little kids just get... well... rowdy. And little. Like today, they were spanking me and running around like little gremlins. They grab everything from out in front of you that you did not have the forsight to lock and stow before takeoff, and if you do not lock and stow before take off, they take off with it faster than you can say... put that thing back where it came from or so help me!

Prize Chest Haul September/October 2013

Prize Chest Haul September/October 2013

Motivate to Educate! 

That`s my favorite slogan from the English book we use at my school. Here`s my recent stash from the dollar store. More coming, because I have a big stash at my house that I will bring to the school when my prize chest gets a bit barren again. 

Prizes and stickers: Prizes are for when students get 6 stickers for doing their homework each class for 6 weeks, or 6 times if they do not do their homework. For the little kids I just give them small dried fish with almonds, but the elementary kids are really into these animals and bubble gum. I don`t know why they go cuckoo for the bubble gum, but they do, and it`s packaged in these funny square boxes in Japan. I had some fancier stickers but the kids love the strange puffy stickers from the dollar store. Who knew? Everyone was happy. When word got out that the other teacher had plastic animals in his prize chest, I was bombarded with questions of why there weren`t also plastic animals in my chest. So here they are kiddos! Enjoy! 

Changes to my Classroom Spring 2013 (March)

Changes to my Classroom: Spring 2013

Now: Days of the Week at center, birthday poster to the side of the white board. 

The space where the blank faces are is reserved for decorations pertaining to current material we're covering and enrichment activities. I will explain the blank faces later.

Decorations from our new preschool curriculum "PLAYTIME" by Oxford University Press.

They came on flimsy, uninspiring and hard to fit to my classroom posters so I cut them up to suit my room and laminated the pieces. 

More Playtime items visible to the right of the Days of the Week poster. we have a weather wheel from something else, but the numbers look really nice and I have shapes and weather too. Counting has become part of our routine. 

BEFORE 

Gross old dry erase poster, days of the week poster was too close to the bookshelf and this became a problem in my larger classes, old posters which hadn't been changed out for a while which I rarely used in the lessons, and didn't seem to engage the kids well to begin with. Overall the decorations have become much more functional to the lessons and are making a marked difference for me in engaging my students of all ages.

Buggy About Spring 2013

Buggy About Spring 2013

Here is our seasonal bulletin! Happy that kotatsu season is almost over! 

This project took about 4 hours with help, but mostly because we were laminating new goodies received from the foreign buyer's club.

This is my door decoration. I remembered tissue paper decorating and, in the washroom one day, realized that the pink toilet paper we use would make a great tree on my door. I could only do half because they are sliding doors and three dimensional would not work for it. 

Detail on the bug. We put our faces on the big ones.

What the full door looks like.

We had so much fun at our school decorating party.  I'm thankful another of our school's teacher, their friend, and my husband were there to help out. It was a nice night. 

Napoleon Dynamite TV Show Address Song- Funny!

Napoleon Dynamite Address Song (From the television show which was aired on FOX but unfortunately didn't continue for long) It always had me in stitches! Love it!

AND I find myself wanting to sing it in my English classes...