Day 8: Fantastic Mr. Fox

First day in the classroom: awesome. My teacher is wonderful, her kids are awesome and so cute I almost cried, the school is so friendly and the staff/aids were a huge part of my feeling welcome, and all other good praises! The kids call me Ms. C and are asking if I'll come teach them here in Kazakhstan when I graduate (typical friendliness of 2nd graders I think :) ) and the classroom management I've seen in Ms. B's class has been a great model as to how I can mold my own classroom. She has basically given me the choice of how I want this experience to look; she said I could observe, interact with students, teach, whichever I wanted! So I talked about how the first day or two I want to do a little more observing than usual in seeing how elementary education works (you know how secondary and elementary are two very different monsters) and get to know names... not to mention phase into the classroom so it's not too much of a shock for the kiddos. I circulated the room and knew everyone's name by the end of the day (only 16 of them in her class total and 13 were present... 3 were still on vacation) and want to next learn where they are from. I know that we have some students from Korea, India, Finland, America, and Kazakhstan but want to make sure I know the rest. I spent the first half of the day with them, had a small pull-out group for reading and circulated during math, had some lunch, went upstairs for an Intensive English class (basically ELL) and finished with art with my kids! My mentor teacher, Ms. B, has a 2 year old (funny enough, her husband was the ELL teacher I was with!) and goes home right after lunch to relieve their nanny, so Tim and I are trying to figure out what would be a best use of my time for the remainder of the day. I'll keep you posted!

Something that was huge for me today was getting to know one of the aids in Ms. B's class. Her name is Ireena, she's a 23 year old Kazakh with a degree in translation and interpretation. She was unbelievably friendly and engaging, asking questions and always making sure I felt comfortable and knew what was going on. I guess it just kind of reiterated the importance of being that friendly face and in being interested in newcomers, it goes a LONG way in making them feel welcomed. In all, everyone at the school was very friendly and I got to meet a lot of teachers and hear their stories. The strength it must take to move your whole family to another country! It's incredible to me. And the kids in my class are so smart and so want to be in school, its almost an idealic setting. I know it won't be like this for long or for me particularly, but its been nice to have this whirlwind of culture shock and change staved by a good school experience. Tomorrow is the day Keri and I (hopefully) move into our new host family's place with them and is also a staff meeting where we will be meeting all the teachers and sitting in on some good 'ole administration junk :) also, Friday may be an interesting day for us. The U.S. Embassy did a Toys for Tots drive through the school and wanted some teachers to help distribute the toys to villages around 80km outside Astana during school hours this Friday, so naturally Tim thought maybe we'd be interested! I truly hope it works out, we've only been in cities in Kazakhstan and there's a whole other culture in the nomadic villages that I know Keri and I would love to experience. Here's to hoping it becomes a reality!

Anyway, off to bed with me. I can't believe it's almost 9:40 and I haven't passed out! Bye bye jetlag! Unfortunately, I'll meet you again in two weeks... blurgh.

Hope you're well :)
Chels