Day 8: I believe I can fly

Before we start class every day, we line the kids up and talk about the weather, how they're feeling, what the date is, and then we sing some songs. The other night, Jenna and I were discussing several different options we could have in the lottery for them to choose and we kept falling back to the classics: Old McDonald, Mary had a Little Lamb, Twinkle Twinkle, etc. We wanted to spruce the songs up a bit so we asked around to see what other teachers were singing as their opening songs. Preston (another teacher in our group) told us that he taught his group how to sing "I Believe I Can Fly", so we decided to give it a shot.

For the kids to fully enjoy this song, I tried to perform with the most outrageous and dramatic moves, so the kids would understand the song more fully. The funny thing is, they all mimicked what I did and they just thought it was the funniest thing. I almost enjoyed how hard they were laughing over how funny it was just to hear this song in an Asian accent. Overall, it was a good choice and I think it will be a permanent one in the song choice cup.

Tonight we practiced our dance for the talent show we are going perform in tomorrow. Each of the schools here in Zhongshan, along with many other groups, will be performing in a talent show for around 500 Chinese parents, teachers, students, etc. It's a pretty big deal, the Chinese take their performances very seriously. So naturally, we Americans waited until the night before to plan it and perfect it, typical.

We are the only group with boy teachers, so we thought it would be funny to take advantage of that and have the boys to dress as girls, and the girls as boys. We are dancing and singing to One Directions "You Don't Know You're Beautiful". I choreographed it all for our group, and by choreographed, I really mean taught the group one of my fabulous Zumba dances I learned last semester at BYU, and the boys really took flamboyant to a whole new level. They really are good sports and so good to have around, they make things easier and so much more fun. Overall, the dance actually turned out really well, especially with the small amount of time we allotted to plan it out. I will write all about it tomorrow and share some pictures. As for now, I am so exhausted and calling it a night.

Pictures:
#1: These are our people :)
#2: Ms. Jenna Bean and myself on our first bus ride out of Kaiyin
#3: Such a cute little bakery with the most delicate cakes, I loved them.
#4: Cool trees lining the street, they made the light look green, it was really wild.