The play's the thing

Here's the problem. For this week, I have Elementary and Junior High Christmas practices every day. For example, tommorrow is three hours of elementary in the morning, and a two hour junior high in the afternoon. There will be no rest before Christmas! So given that, blogging is not going to factor high on my to-do list. Instead, you may expect serial installments of my Christmas play, scene by scene. My Christmas gift to you [note: sarcasm]. Please remember that it was writen for an audience of about 1000 grade 6 - 9 students, most of whom are not quite competent in English. It's simple, and Kathleen likes to point out that I used every Christmas cliche in the book. But, I figure that it's not cliched if none of the students have seen Chrismas plays, right?!

Oh, and Kathleen is "Suzy" the oldest shepherd, AMber (another foreign teacher) is Angel #1, and I am playing the "Rich Person." THey wanted some foreign faces among the grade 7 actors. We have 4 more practices and then the performance, here's hoping it's good! It's a lot of pressure, but fun, too.

Guest Post: Kathleen

As you know, my method for introducing "Travel" to grade five students is Flat Stanley. He's been featured on Carole's blog before: I like to show our flat visitors a good time in Taipei. It also works the other way, though. My kids were thrilled this week to get their Stanleys back from visiting Canada (hosted by Mom and Dad). I have some pretty skeptical kids, though, and they were convinced I just photo-shopped their Stanleys in front of a picture of the CN Tower. But, my final proof was a picture of Dad holding them by our apartment in Thornhill. All the kids Ohh-ed and Aww-ed and one brave boy asked "How old is he?" I answered, expecting their 10 year old brains to think of him as old. But they all gasped and looked shocked! One boy yelled out- "But... my Dad is 63!"

Grumpy day

Sorry I didn't post this weekend, I've been busy finishing grading, finishing up Nanowrimo (with very expensive prizes) with my students, and trying to plan my Chinese New Year Vacation.

Today it's Monday, and I'm throughly grumpy. Entirely out of sorts. Partially because I have less than two weeks to get my part of the Christmas show together and partially because of gifts.

Let me rant for a moment. I spent all the last two weeks doing my Christmas shopping, for my students, my co-teachers, my housemates, and my secret Santa. I had so much fun buying it all, and wrapping everything. Gifts ARE my love language. Now, I recognize that this is not true for others, and do not expect reciprocation to equal degree.

HOWEVER~ if you are in a foreign country for Christmas and you live and work and spent 95% of your life with 5 other women, you get them SOMETHING for Christmas. I do not care if you take a piece of printer paper, and draw a Christmas tree with markers. But you have to do something, or else I feel very rejected and unloved; which leads to a very grumpy Monday.

The three people this is directed towards don't read my blog, and the rest of you have no complusion to get me a present, I just needed a rant. Deep, calming breaths.

Odd juxtaposition

One of my grade 6 girls is sending thie card to her pen pal. It made me laugh. Nothing says Merry Christmas more than a Halloween card! It surprises me more that she even chose it, she should know the difference between Halloween and Christmas!

Other than this one, I find almost all of the Christmas cards in Taiwan completely adorable. I sent out some of them to you, in fact. I think I might go buy more to stock up for future years, there are just that many cute designs. Coming to a mailbox near you shortly. If you want to get a cute card from Taiwan and you don't think you're on my Christmas list, you can post or email me your address and I'll send you one. Even if I don't know you - it's less than a dollar for the card and the stamp together! Share the Taiwan Christmas joy. You can even request one with an odd cartoon, or improper grammar or a card / christmas tree ornament. Seriously. Post or email, I'll do it.

November Chair

Thank goodness I bought that Ikea Chair for Claire's visit last summer, it certainly came in handy during the month of November! This was one of my last days of writing, so I made Kathy take a picture of my writing pose, to remember Nanowrimo in Taiwan.

Advent

Kathleen freaked out this morning because she realized that it was already December 4th and she didn't have an advent calendar. I tried to convince her it wasn't the end of the world. But it also reminded me that I had been looking forward to seeing the one that Susan from Visual Voice made.

I just checked out the last three days and was not disappointed! I think it's a fabulous way to celebrate advent. I especially liked day 2, because I was just worrying about that very thing today. I'm trying to get up my nerve to go through with all these 'follow my dreams' decisions that I'm not entirely sure will fly. Actually, tommorrow is the big day to make the announcement to my boss. Eeks. I needed that encouragement that I shouldn't feel bad about making those decisions. Courage, Carole, courage!

Anyway, I put a link to the Advent Calendar up at the top of the sidebar, if you want to follow advent that way.

It's a tree, a fairy and a throne

My Second unit for my grade 7 classes was about A Midsummer Night's Dream. Frankly, I think Shakespeare will be so much more enjoyable for them later in life if they have a fun and creative introduction to him now. We read an adapted version, made quarotos about all the characters, and then put on the play as a class. Finally, we're watching a little bit of the movie. The whole thing has been so much fun for me and for my students. It makes me pretty sure that I'll enjoy teaching other forms of literature as well. I'm sad that the unit is over!

This is one of my Grade 7 boys classes performance of a Midsummer Night's Dream. Obviously not on par with the girls class, but that's a bit like comparing apples and oranges. The boys tried hard, although no one quite had their lines learned, and costumes were a bit lacking. Still funny though.

Take a Bow

This was our cast for the Grade 7 girls' class' performance of A Midsummer Night's Dream. They did an absolutely incredible job, I was proud of the actors and of all the girls in the class who put the whole thing together.

A donkey

In our play, Lysander turns into the donkey. A bit of a change from the original, but when it's gets shortened to 4 pages, some characters have to combine. The whole storyline with Bottom the Weaver and the players was cut out.

HAPPY DECEMBER!

I win! I'm done my novel. I haven't formatted it yet, so I'm not sure how many pages it is. but it's definitely over 50,000 words. And it didn't turn out so bad in the end, I went back and added more chapters during the 'junior high years.' Next step is to format it and print it out and make a book like last year. Of course I think that's not really going to happen in December. We're starting lunchtime Christmas performance practices today!

A work of art

I consider my flashcards to be a work of art. These were some of the ones I was the proudest of, I made them for my Grade 1 Afterschool class. We learned the poem:

1,2,3,4,5
Once I caught a fish alive
6,7,8,9,10
Then I let him go again

Why did you let him go?
Because he bit my finger so!

Cultural Difference

So I think I mentioned that International Travel Fair that we all went to last week. It was one of the worst 'crowd-experiences' of my life. SO many people, and everyone is pushing and squeezing. Excessive intrusion into my personal space bubble! Anyway, this was the one picture I took before I panicked and pushed my way to the door.

Eva Airlines is one of Taiwan airlines, and they have a special "Hello Kitty" plane. All the flight attendents wear the outfits, and you too can have your picture taken in one of the chairs.

Work Day

Yes. So, I am behind in my novel. Like 15,000 words behind. That's bad - but not unconquerable. This is when my discipline kicks in. So far, I've written for two hours this morning. If I write 6 more hours today, I can finish my whole book! We'll see. All that to say, please don't expect anything from me for the next 3 days. Oh, and sorry, but I'm not putting the rest of my novel online for awhile. It's just gotten so bad, I'm too embarrassed to put it on right now. Right now, I'm trying to connect the dots and make it a book, but until that happens, I can't stand to have it floating around cyberspace.

Christmas in Taipei

See my christmas tree? Only took me like 3 hours to craft last weekend.

I'm excited about Christmas in Taipei. We're going to do a gift exchange, and the four of us booked a hotel suite to stay over Christmas eve. We're going to bring all our presents, and our little tree, and on Christmas morning get coffee and celebrate. It's going to be quite a bit more festive than last year.

Except that I can't have this, or anything remotely close to it. Only in Canada. )=

Is it the weekend yet?

This is one of my housemates. She's a very hard worker, so when she's at home in the evening, she's usually working on something. This week, we saw her settle in to work, and a few minutes later we saw her like this - wiped out over her work. It's been a long week for quite a few of us.

Happy Thanksgiving!

We just had the most interesting dinner with our principal and her adult son, our company boss, and the six of us teachers. I use the word interesting to be polite. Actually, we walked up the one floor from her house to hours, sat down, and vented for half an hour! It will certainly be a thanksgiving to remember.

Yet I have so many things to be thankful for. But for today, I am most thankful for my incredible students. Every class I had today was full of kids that I just love and who inspire me. Every time I think about leaving them, I feel like crying. This is my second year teaching most of them, so I feel like I know them and care so much about them. They're wonderful and I'm so thankful I get to see them every day.

Share the road.

Chalk this uo to 'things you don't see everyday.' I was walking to the bank, and was stopped in my tracks by these two little guys happily riding their bikes in circles. No one even gave them a second look, they just walked right around them. I stopped to take a picture! (=

Home away from home

It's winter. It's chilly and it's wet. Starbucks is my world. (=

"All the sweet serenity of books"

Isn't this is a cute shot? The library is rearranging, and the librarian has all the books piled on the floor. There really can't be any order to it.

But it doesn't stop the students. This was two of my students before our grade 5 Advanced English class, I grabbed my camera and took the shot just before the bell rang and everyone ran to their desks.

Library