Tuesday, August 2nd.

Two things:1) IT'S AUGUST. When and how did that happen? Literally this is so weird on so many levels. To the fact that that means my time here is getting shorter and shorter...and the time between now and college is also getting shorter and shorter..and my birthday is soon and ahhhhh! It's August, folks. The dreaded month for all of the back-to-schoolers. 2) This time next week I will be boarding a plane for London. And it's still August. Two months went slow, and it went fast, for many different reasons. But it's August and that means I'll be home soon! Today, I continued working on my report and luckily made some progress and ended with around 21 pages this afternoon. Matilda came back! (Yay!!) and she was very helpful in looking through my rough (rough, rough, rough, rough) draft before sending it off to my mentor Dr. Midega and the other researchers here at icipe. I also taught my class from 5-6 like usual. A lot of my kiddos were late because they were cleaning and doing their jobs. I think from 4-5 (maybe a little longer?) the classes and kids are assigned different jobs to do. Some sweep the dirt, others mop...it's very different from back in the United States. Because of that we only had about 40 minutes as opposed to the hour, but we still got a lot done!I taught them about "starting words" like first, second, third, fourth, finally, after, before, next, then, following, in conclusion and explained "chronological" to them. We spelt the word with our bodies. We "built" a fake sandwich (I think it was fictional tomato and lettuce?) and I asked them the steps on how to build it. I remember doing something similar with PB&J in grade school but realized they've probably never had that before so I changed my lesson just a bit :) We did the same thing with describing time, what their morning and evening routines are, getting to school, and with the life cycle of their teacher Elvis. I drew a baby, a little kid, a 5th grader, someone my age, and an older person...and we talked about Elvis as a baby and the chronological order of growing up. And then he opened the door. Talk about awkward. It was a good laugh, a bit embarrassing for me, but the kids LOVED it. Someone was playing with some action figures and I took some and showed the chronological order by telling a bogus story of superheroes. Stacy the Snake (some lady on a bike), Superman (real Superman), and a dog (J-Dog, the nickname for one of my kids in class). I stood on a chair and pretending the ground was water, had some kid make "help" noises pretending to be drowning Stacy, and then the real winner was J-Dog in the end. I'm hoping they grasped the concept! We also talked about semicolons, punctuations, speech marks...the typical review. I'm not sure what I'll teach tomorrow. Khalela was walking back at the same time I was, so we walked together and I went to the dinner area early. I ended up spilling my soda (I knew I shouldn't have gotten one in the first place!) all over Khalela's computer but I think it's okay now! Be on the lookout for my article in the newspaper soon!Sawa sawa,Holly