Schedule? What schedule?

So we have now been at the Centre for a little over a week and a half and we are all beginning to settle into a routine. Or atleast as much of a routine that is possible here. Mostly by schedule I mean that we wake up at 830 or so every morning, eat lunch at 1245 or so, run our extracurricular clubs at 515, supper at 645, and our Lost viewing party begins at 900 each night. Everything in between is just chaos and changes by the minute. Even our club time is not very concrete as much of it depends on how quickly the children assemble. But we are starting to get a hang of everything and its all starting to fall in place quite nicely.

In addition to the after school clubs, we have been lending a hand (aka pretty much running) in the classes for the children who stay at Centre during the day. It is pretty funny because this was something that was kind of thrown on our plate when we got here and its been pretty hectic. We were under the impression that we would just be assisting in the classes but it now seems that much of the expectation is to teach the classes fully on our own. For instance, the first day that I helped out in the Social Sciences class, the teacher showed me the page for the lesson and told the students what they were doing, then left. It was actually quite exciting for me since I am a teaching nerd but I know some of the other members were a little stressed about it. My first experience teaching any sort of class was quite successful, even with some language barriers the students behaved very well and cooperated great with me. They even followed me around the Centre without running off or anything haha. Guess I just have a gift for that kind of thing. The schooling thing though seems to be settling down though and hopefully we will be able to put most of our efforts into the clubs, as is Paul's desire. (Paul is our contact here and he is the busiest/most wonderful person I have ever met. Seriously he rocks.) Two ladies from Mauritiaus (sp?) got here this week as part of an education service program so they have much more experience in classroom settings and their projects for this summer are supposed to be with the classes. That will help a lot and they are going to be here until August like us.

We have now had two days in which we have met with the individual clubs. So far I have been in charge of the Nature Club. The first meeting, on Wednesday, was a little rocky. We didnt have any activities planned and so I just asked the kids what they would want to do as a club and their attention span was all of about 10 minutes. Luckily one of the older kids has been helping me with translating and just getting the younger children to cooperate and it has been extremely helpful. Yesterday, at our second meeting, I had the children collect three different leaves so that we could shade them with crayons on some computer paper. That went super good and I really feel that they had a good time with it. My older helper even said afterwards that he liked it and while we were coloring he asked to go collect more leaves. The pictures turned out super cool and I have decided that for Monday we should make a collage out of all of them. The children would like to display their art and so in this case I decided we should make a club poster that displays everyones work. Should be fun. I think that as long as I can continue to have activities for the children then the club will be very successful and fun for the kids.

Well my eyes are hurting from all of this typing so I think I am gonna wrap this up. I just wanted try and describe our actual projects this summer as best I could. As you can see this can be difficult when things tend to change everyday.

Livin and lovin,
-jamie.

PS---For a more comedic and highly subjective interpretation of events please visit DeAnna's blog (link is on the right side of this page)