I had to say goodbye to one of my students last Friday- his family is moving to Canada! I really and truly will miss him- I loved his attitude and smile and sense of humor and work. We had a big ole party for him at the end of the day, which we'd planned for all week (mothers involved and everything) and STILL managed to keep a secret from Patrick! It was so much fun. We had a cake, and one of the mothers took last year's class picture, photoshopped me into it with his second grade teacher, and got it framed with a mat that we could all sign. All the kids had made cards or letters at home for him and brought them in and then we took a picture of all of us in the classroom. And then we prayed for him. I started, and told the kids that if they wanted to say a short prayer for him, to raise their hands and I'd say their name. About six kids did that, including one boy that is new this year and not from a believing background, but had become good friends with Patrick. It was so beautiful to be able to do that, to encourage them to pray for each other, and to hear Patrick say "It doesn't matter where we are, God is still with us."
It's been one week without him, and we said several times every day "I miss Patrick".
The only good thing about it is that now i have 16 students, which (unlike 17) CAN be evenly divided into rows, or work groups, etc. *grin*
This week in third grade we are learning about classifying animals, how to divide words into syllables, adding -ing to words, all about the trials of Job, and we are starting a new grammar chapter (yeah action verbs!). The verb chapter has baseball as its theme and so a lot of the sentences use baseball words and verbs. That's great for the USofA, but here in Peru- well, i spend as much time explaining the game of baseball and the vocab in the practice pages as I do explaining the actual lesson! *grin* I wish I had one of those World Series dvd things from when the White Sox won... we could watch it as a Grammar movie!
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