First placement... CHECK!

Phew. Tomorrow stars a whole new adventure, a whole new placement, and the second half of my experience here in New Zealand. I just calculated it out.. and we just past the halfway mark of our trip. Time has been flying by and there were so many moments this week where I found myself thinking, "Wow... yeah.. I could live here. I could do this." What an awesome realization to have. Since the first couple weeks were so hard, it was hard to see myself here, but especially yesterday I had a glorified moment where I just couldn't see myself anywhere but here. But more on that later :)

My kids didn't really "excel" persay in the cross country. Our best runner decided to run slow in his race because he "wanted to get 100th place". What an achievement. Especially since he could have gotten somewhere in the top 20 if he had tried, haha. I yelled and cheered a LOT for my kids.. they did a really good job. I taught them the "bunny bunny" game while we were waiting for the group that was running to show up at the finish line. I took lots of pictures and some video as well and made a movie for my students out of it. It was super cute and I think that they really liked it.

On Tuesday, my kids TRASHED the room during morning tea and lunch, so I told them Wednesday morning that they were kicked out of the room for morning tea and lunch for the rest of the week. We talked about why, but they were still INCREDIBLY angry at me. Like, so angry that they couldn't wait until I was out of the classroom, haha.

Tuesday night I emailed my teacher just to let her know that it's not fair that the school put me in the position of "teacher" instead of "student teacher" for my kids. She wrote me back with some pointers of what I could have the kids do and all that, so that was really nice. Then she said she'd make sure that I had a reliever until she came back on Friday, just to give me feedback since it was my lead week anyway. During assembly on Wednesday morning, one of the teachers in our team pulled me aside and asked what she could do to help support me because she felt bad at it wasn't fair. I just told her I needed feedback, so she pulled the substitute that was there for my teacher that day out as well and asked her if she could do that. And she did! I actually didn't teach until Wednesday afternoon (because morning is Enrichment), but when I did, she asked me for something that she could watch for, which was really nice.

During Enrichment, I went to the primary school that Laura and Chelsea were at just to check it out. I observed our friend John's classroom and it was super funny. When he kids are sitting on the carpet, he makes them sit with their legs folded and their arms folded as well. SUPER ADOR. He taught a swimming lesson which was cute, too. He runs a tight ship, that's for sure. He was incredibly organized, however, and the kids knew what they were doing at any given time, which was really nice. Then I biked back to my school in the pouring rain, almost got hit by a car (biking on the other side of the road causes difficulties sometimes...) and got back to my classroom to find all of my students (who had been kicked out) hanging around inside. I got SOOOOO angry and kicked them all out (we had some whiners... but none of them actually came up to me to talk to me about it), so I finished their little cross country video in that time.