Elementary Teacher...I can't help it!

After just finishing a semester of student teaching, spending 35 hours a week with 21 10-year-olds, just seeing all the cute kids running around my apartment complex wasn't meeting my "kid time quota." Just when I was thinking that I really missed interacting with younger people and trying to figure out how to solve this problem, I met a friend of a friend, who teaches English to 8 and 9 year olds on the the weekends. She invited the two of us to watch her teach that weekend, and it didn't take too much convincing for me! During the time that she was actually teaching, we just sat in the back and watched her, but during the breaks and afterwards I was able to interact with some of the kids!

(racing to hit the word the teacher called out)

(The whole class. The girl in the back center is the teacher, and the other two adults are friends that came)

(The poor kid in the blue coat apparently is about to get punched in the face and attacked from behind!)

(The "scholar" of the class, stroking his beard. Somehow this kid managed to make it into almost every picture I took!)

After watching, we got to meet the secretary and headmaster of the school, pictured below.

(L to R: me, headmaster, Linda, Yang(teacher))

Later that same day, I was with some other friends, and we found a bookstore. Usually the bookstores are small and of course just have Chinese books, but this one was quite the find! Besides a few books written in (or translated into) English, the children's section had a few English books translated into Chinese! A few had pinyin (romanization to represent the Chinese sounds) as well as characters, which I convinced myself would be good language practice.

my purchasesThis book doesn't have pinyin, so it'll take me a while to read, but I love the illustrations, and books about the Holocaust have always intrigued me(Janette Oke wrote this one...you can see the pinyin above the characters)