Day 96: Teacha Yummy

Since I have taught all but one of the six teaching areas this semester, I have finally be assigned to teach kitchen for the remainder of our time here. There are both good and bad things that come with this teaching area, however. On the positive side, the kids absolutely love you and listen so well in class, because they know "yummy food" awaits them at the end of class. Also, your name is replaced with the title of "Teacha Yummy". On the downside, there is a lot of prep to do the night before class, and I have already forgotten to prepare once out of two days. I had to make two batches of muffins at six thirty am this morning, in order to have my treats ready and to be to class on time. So, after today's early morning, I think I have learned my lesson to prepare the night before.

Like I mentioned earlier, I made muffins for my class today, and I paired the muffins with the story, "If you Give a Moose a Muffin", similar to the story, "If you a Give a Mouse a Cookie". To give a little background knowledge of the plot of the book, this moose requests many things of this little boy, which leads to other requests, and more requests, all after the boy gave him the moose a muffin. To incorporate language into my lesson, I brought an item related to each request the moose had made and asked the kids act out each scene. My favorite prop of the day happened to be my sweatshirt, randomly. Despite the sweltering heat today, my little kidlets all wanted to try it on after I had read about the large moose trying on the boy's jacket. Instead of the jacket being too small for hem, as the moose's was, the jacket was at least six sizes too large for each of them. Their little bodies just drowned in it. I had to snap a few pictures, because they looked so cute and I could just see each of their sassy little personalities, even with most of their body and face being covered. It was such a good time and a good lesson.

After class and our weekly Tuesday meeting, Jenna, Lexi, Amanda, Preston, and I all headed to the pool. However, the pool we normally go to was closed. We only found out it was closed after about forty five minutes of trying to communicate in English to a Chinese employee, which was highly unsuccessful. So, we decided to leave and try the pool down by the park where we do cross fit. Although it was a long process and journey to get there, it turned out to be well worth it. It was much larger and deeper than the pool we normally visited, and had more than two lawn chairs!! Score!

We laid out for quite some time (and are now quite burnt), but at one point, we noticed a group of boys sitting on the exercise equipment outside of the pool looking at us. At first, we thought it was creepy, but then they would cheer for us if we dove into the pool or something stupid, so it more so turned into just a funny situation. Then, this man came up to us, well, mostly to Jenna, and asked to take a picture with us, while in our bathing suits, remember? Anyways, he spoke no English and just tried acting out where he wanted us to be positioned in the picture, and it just so happened he wanted us to surround him and smile, with him looking like a pimp in the middle. It was so terribly awkward.

There were a few weird occurrences at the pool today, but it was overall a good experience as usual. I think I've been convinced to change pools, the one we went today was just perfect. I can't wait for more sunny days!