This is the universal sign for.... let's do another round.

It's 7:30 pm, it's been pitch black for about an hour, but it's still 84 degrees outside, but the high was 93 degrees earlier today. It's Monday, which means that I didn't have any classes in the afternoons and was lesson planning/grading/ meeting with our school director from noon to five pm (yes I'm aware, school ends at three...). The week started out well, however I did have to put multiple students in time out today.
I had a new student added to my class today, he is pretty darn cute but it's amazing for me to see how my three year olds already have the systems down and know how to sit at a table or how to line up at the door. They did well at helping him out, pictures to come soon! We are starting a unit on animals today... I really wish that I could take my kids to a farm or a zoo, they certainly would remember the animal names and noises then! We see our friend Mr. Owl (there are at least three Mr. Owls outside our classroom) who we say hi to almost every day and we count them, and we know how they flap their wings and one of my sweet little ones even recognized how these beautiful burrowing owls wriggle their bodies.

My writing classes has been fairly easy so far, especially since I'm getting a feeling of how competent my students are, what their strengths are, and what kind of support they are going to need. None of my students are native English speakers, which actually makes it easier to help them with their writing because they associate their mistakes with being an ELL learner instead of an incompetency. I will have to share some of their writing eventually, because I've already received some really great responses to our daily writing prompts.

On a balmier and more tropical note, the three other new teachers and I rented a taxi and headed out to Lecheria, this time for the whole weekend. We went out the first night and had some delicious pizza from a popular restaurant just off the main street in Lecheria about twenty minute walk away from our beach house's compound, passing the golf course and the a 15 foot deep hole in the middle of the side-walk which is now entitled "big ****'ing hole by one of my co-workers. After scarfing down some dinner, we attempted to get our bill, with me attempting to translate. Our wonderful waiter was aware that we had another waiter refilling our bills, so instead of bringing us a total of six beers, he made sure we only had four or five between the four of us. This brought us to thinking that when it was time for the bill, doing the universal signal for encircling the group to mean "put the bill together", he thought *of course they want to do another round*... we laughed it off and drank our cervezitas.

We then headed out to grab another tiny beverage on the steps of the restaurant/shop area and ended up being lured into conversation by some Venezuelan guys who were trying to hit on my friend Shannon. Once she explained to them in spanglish that her husband Jay was standing next to her, they stopped talking to us for a total of 20 minutes... we then chatted it up again when I realized one of the guys was saying some things in English. I asked "porque tu hablas ingles?" and he responded "because I'm English". We met the one guy from Manchester living in Lecheria, working at a software company (we think). We ended up hanging out with this group of Venezuelan/foreigner gentlemen for a couple of hours, and went to another bar with them. We ended up going home around 1:30 and crashing until the next morning. We spent five hours on the Lecheria beach eating fresh avocado with chips and getting supremely sunburnt.

Hope you enjoy these photos as much as I enjoyed my weekend.