Happy April Fools Day from the island!

To sum it up….Day 2 of teaching was a success, school is over for the day, I'm by the poolside, and life is good.

The longer version….We started teaching yesterday. It was really good to have the 4-5 days to acclimate and get used to our new environment before starting teaching. We even got a dive in despite the challenging weather conditions and saw sea turtles and sting rays! One of us even had a closer wildlife encounter than intended and got bitten by a sea turtle….whoops. She's fine though.

Sea Turtle sighted! 

Day 1 I mostly shadowed my new partnership teacher, Miss Sharon, who teaches Standards 5 and 6 (Grades 7 and 8). The class size here is TINY - Standard 5 is the largest at 16. They have assembly in the morning MWF which is really cute, they all stand in lines and sing the national anthem followed by morning announcements.

Heading out of Pedro's for our first day of teaching! 

Day 2 I actually taught a Language Arts class on Conjunctions with no plans whatsoever because the teacher had to leave last minute. I started with going over their sight words - which they knew really well - then had them write sentences and stories using the sight words and share them. They loved sharing their sentences and stories with the rest of the class, which is new for me. By this time I thought Miss Sharon would be back but she wasn't so I jumped straight into conjunctions, which thank goodness is something from grammar that I remember. After going through a few examples and basic sentence diagrams they did some exercises in their books and wrote their own sentences. The rest of the day was spent in science, which I don't have to teach (thank goodness!) and health, where they planned the meal they will cook for a presentation on Friday.

Day 2 was also April Fools Day, which is apparently taken very "seriously" here in Belize. While waiting for school to start the kids were sharing the pranks they pulled on their parents, or their parents pulled on them. Then during writing practice they free wrote about April Fools pranks. One girl described a very detailed prank she'd like to pull on another intern, which involved a bucket above the door filled with sardines and mud, but then Miss Sharon walked in the door instead of the intern and she got detention. We all thought it was hilarious, even the other intern!

I love this poster from the Standard VI classroom. 

Lunch on day 2. We get given lunch which is really awesome :) 

View at dinner tonight - not too shabby!