A Couple Success Stories

At our conference this week, I've had more internet access and while I've been talking to people from home, I've felt so boring saying that nothing is new or noteworthy in my life.  So, I've been trying to think what are some of the more exciting stories from my life and here is what I have come up with.

I have a lot of new kids books that were donated by the Darien Book Aid.  I put them in my classroom this month and we started a sort of library program in my classroom where the kids can borrow the books for a week.  My kids are going crazy over it!  They flock to my classroom every chance they can to turn in their book and get a new one.  They keep track of which books their friends have read and enjoyed so that they can borrow them too.  And I'm so proud of my host sister because she took out a short chapter book (one of the Magic Tree House books) and read the whole thing!  And one of my students borrowed a history book that my mom (my real mom) gave me and it has created quite the stir in the region as one of our best history teachers (who works at my sitemate Beth's school) really wants it and is sending Beth's host sister and our other sitemate Josh's host brother to harass me about getting the book for him.

In my 11th form class recently we were learning about Shakespeare and I wrote a short version of Romeo and Juliet for them to perform.  Totally independently, one of our casts made themselves little props for the apothecary character and they put pillows on the ground so that they could die comfortably and everything.  They did an awesome job!

I started some new activities in January and one of the new things I'm doing is an Extra Help activity.  Last year when I tried to do something similar, I just ended up with a bunch of kids coming to play games and I was disappointed.  But this time, at least the one week that I have run it so far, was really successful!  I had 2 girls come in to do their homework and have me around to answer questions and I had another girl come in with specific grammar issues to prepare for her test the next day and my host sister came to look up new words from her library book in the dictionary!