First Day of Class (June 7)

Today was my first day of class with the 6th graders, and it was definitely an experience. I am exhausted, but very content.

I will be spending this week with the 6th grade. It is a class of 35 students between the ages of 10 and 11. We had to be at the school at about 7:30... so therefore, we had to wake up at 6(ish). We were running a little late, and we forgot to tell Marta that we had to leave at 6:50. She kept saying "Que pena! Porque no me digas?!" Then, we had to practically run to school (which is about a 15 minute run/walk). The elevation definitely made it hard. Quito also has tonnns of traffic... and cars don't stop for people... Instead, the people must stop for the the cars. Some people just run out and avoid the cars like a game of frogger... Not me, Sam, and Sarah however...

When we got to the school, I went straight to the 6th grade classroom. They started with math where they are learning about bar graphs, regular/irregular shapes, etc.

After math was English. Sam and Sarah joined me for this, and we taught them a song (Boom, Boom Ain't It Great To Be Crazy). We also we helping them with simple sentence creation (i.e. they would look at a picture of something and have to describe what was going on in the picture.

After English was Language and Culture where they were learning about the history of Ecuador.

During recreo (recess) the teachers normally have tea and bread in the lounge, but the sixth grade girls wanted me to spend recess with them. They were hanging off my arms like monkeys, offering me their snacks and asking me questions. A couple of the girls drew me pictures.

Later in the day I taught them the hokey-pokey, which they really seemed to like.

At 12:30 I left with Sam and Sarah for lunch at Alejandro's restaurant. We (as usual) had soup and rice, which is always accompanied by some kind of meat and desert.

After lunch we had to rush off to Spanish lessons. Too bad it took us about 20 minutes to get inside our apartment (we could not for the life of us open the door!)

When we finally got to the lesson, we finally got to the lesson, we separated into different rooms for our two hours of private Spanish lessons.

After our lessons we went to get cell phones and had a coffee before dinner. I went to bed around 9 since we have to get up so early.