What are you doing for Christmas?

This seems to be the question on everyone's lips at the moment. Quite frankly, I'm tired of it. Christmas is about two things. First and foremost it is about the celebration of the birth of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ in human form, so that He could pay the ultimate price for our sins. That part of it I always appreciate. When I think about what He left to come to Earth with all the limitations of a human being, and then paying that ultimate price of a painful death and separation from His father, how can I not be thankful and want to celebrate. I can't. I really want to read that precious story to my students and have them know the truth of what Jesus did for them. Not really an option for me unless God provides it in an unusual way. So I'll just show them His love. He placed me in this school for a reason, and so I just trust that He will give me the opportunities that He wants me to have.

The second thing that Christmas is about is families. My family is thousands of miles away, and the best I can do this year will be a Skype video call (but probably just an audio call). The last Christmas I had with my family was 5 years ago, in December 2006, and was Dad's last Christmas with us. One day I'll have Christmas with my family again, but meanwhile God's called me to Christmas in Cambodia.

So what will I be doing for Christmas? There'll be a church service on Christmas Day, and I'll Skype the family, and hopefully I'll find some friends to spend some time with. I'll probably enjoy some guilt free reading time, maybe watch a Christmas movie, and hopefully cook someone a delicious Christmas dinner (or go out somewhere for a special meal). For most Cambodians it will be just another work day, even though it's Sunday this year as well.

Do I begrudge others their Christmas celebrations? Not at all. I'll be celebrating too, but in a quiet way.

As I've been writing this, I've also been thinking of those who cannot celebrate Christmas openly for various reasons. I can't begin to imagine what it would be like to not celebrate Christmas at all. There are people who can't. Now that would be really tough. I also pray that God will show me a way that I can make Christmas more special for someone else. Stay tuned to find out how I do end up celebrating Christmas. I'm sure I'll have a lovely day.

By the way, what are YOU doing for Christmas?

Planting seeds

Sometimes, as a teacher in a secular school, I wonder what impact I'm having for God's kingdom. Yesterday, God gave me another opportunity to simply plant a seed, for Him to water, nurture and bring to fruit. Three times a week I have to do duty (supervision). On Mondays I have fun with the grade 3 boys on the playground equipment, and on Tuesdays I help make sure everyone eats their lunch and stays seated until it is play time. on Thursdays, I'm back at the playground equipment, but this time with my own grade 4 girls, and often they like to just sit and chat while they eat their snacks. (When school starts at 7.30am and lunch isn't until 1pm, a decent snack at recess time {10.10} is important). Yesterday, one of my girls asked me what I thought was most important about Christmas. The door was wide open, and I quickly responded with "celebrating Jesus' birth". Two of my students promptly responded "yes, that's important for me too!", while another said "presents"! Fair enough. I didn't say any more, but it was just one of those special moments in the course of a day. While I do have several students from Christian backgrounds, I also have many who are not, and so I need to be a little careful how much I say. Instead I just love them, and hope that they see something special in my love, and know that Jesus is the reason I have so much love to give them.

Contemplating Curriculum

This week has seen a new task added to the "To Do" list! One of the joys and challenges of working in an International School is that we do not have a curriculum set by an external body, such as the state or federal government. Instead, the school develops its own curriculum, taking into account current research, and various publicly available curriculum documents. It's a joy, because we can really try to make sure the curriculum meets the learning needs our our particular student body. It's a challenge because it can be time consuming. Either way it's important.

Our current curriculum at East-West has been in place for about six years, so as part of our Accreditation process we are now reviewing that curriculum. First subject off the block for primary school teachers is Language Arts. This is a really interesting and useful process. To start with, it forces one to really read the current curriculum, and think about how it is working well for us (and especially for our students) and also to consider if there are some things that could be improved. While our student population is largely English Second Language learners, we have a curriculum which is based around native English speaking standards. This isn't a criticism, it's a fact. I personally believe that is a good thing. We want our students to be fluent English communicators, and having native English speaking standards definitely helps us work toward that end. It's also interesting to have a look at what other curriculum documents are saying, and seeing how they are similar and how they are different. Sometimes the differences are really just in the way the outcomes are expressed, because they ultimately mean the same thing. Sometimes the differences are quite pronounced, and students on one curriculum are learning things earlier or later than their counterparts on a different curriculum. Which is best for our students?

This week, a colleague and I started looking at the Grade 4 Language Arts curriculum, while colleagues across at other grade levels do the same thing for their grade. So far it has been really interesting to see just how much of what I have been doing this year actually addresses the curriculum really well. Hooray! I'm doing something right. We'll see what the rest of the review brings out. I'm sure there are things I'm missing, so this will help me find those gaps so I can better meet the needs of my students. It was also really good to hear the other teacher (who isn't currently teaching fourth grade but did teach it last year) identify a number of points as being important that I feel are important. Positive reinforcement is valuable for teachers as well as students.

The last time I was involved in curriculum review I dreaded it. This time, I'm enjoying it! Thanks to God for bringing me to this point, and to giving me the strength each day to serve Him by teaching my precious students, and to do all the other jobs that go along with teaching. He is good, and He is my source of strength and peace.

Grade 4K is alive and well.

Wow, I can't believe it's over two weeks since that last blogging feast!

Some of the things we've been doing in Grade 4K include learning more about using maps, which has been heaps of fun. The children brought in various maps they found around home, and I had a few more to share. We also looked at world maps and discovered lines of latitude and longitude. Not easy. Some have got it, while others will need a bit more practice. Today we had fun, making 100 piece world map jigsaw puzzles, then unscrambling the names of the oceans and continents, and then putting the names of the continents in the correct places. More fun is still to come. Comic-strip Map Skills worksheets have been enjoyed.

In Mathematics we did some work on grids and maps and direction to support the Social Studies work, and now we're working on shapes. Lots of fun, especially with some great on-line tools and a data projector.

In Language Arts we've been busy with our Write Rights (thanks to Writing A-Z), and studying Recounts.

Outside school, I enjoyed a colleague's engagement party on Saturday, and am looking forward to a concert next Saturday evening, by a community choir. I've been in the past and they are usually excellent productions.

Christmas is fast approaching, so a Christmas newsletter is high on the priority list, and so is a little Christmas shopping.

So that's it in a nutshell. There's still a post to come on my "mini-holiday", but it's time for bed now. May God bless each person who reads this, and especially those who pray for me and my students.

What's it like to be really cold?

Living in Cambodia does not offer many opportunities for our students to experience what it is like to be really cold, in the way that people who live in places like Canada or the Snowy Mountains or Alaska experience for several months of the year. On Tuesday this week both classes of Grade 4 students had the chance to experience a little of what it's like to be in a frosty environment. We took everyone who was at school this week to visit the Diamond Island Ice Sculpture Show. It was a great opportunity for these children to experience what it would be like to live in a much colder place. OK, so we were there for less than an hour, but it still gave them a taste of being really cold (as opposed to what they think is cold, like when it gets below 25ºC). The children had great fun enjoying the ice slides (and so did the teachers). This was definitely a fun field trip. We'll have an experience to refer to now when we discuss those cold biomes later in the year.

All snuggled up in our warm jackets.

Double Fun

Watch out! You're about to get bumped!

Friends sliding together

 


This fellow didn't have long trousers, but it didn't stop him having a great time.



Riding the ice train!

My awesome TA. This was a first for him too.

The other Grade 4 teacher with one of her students.

Yep, I got in on the action too. This time with one of my students.

 



Book Butterfly Posters

 Our first big Language Arts project for the year was reading a novel and writing a book report on it. Last year I bought some Book Butterfly posters, which provided the framework for the project. The children loved working on the posters, although the writing part was challenging for some of them. For one student who has only been learning English for one year, I modified the task to allow him to draw some of the details for each part of the poster. He is an amazing artist, and so his poster is one of the samples below. I'm so proud of all the students' work that it was hard to choose which ones to post, but I have chosen a few to share with you. Scrap booking templates come in very handy for preparing lines to write on. As you'll see from the samples, every one is different, just like my students. We'll do this activity again toward the end of the year, when hopefully they are all able to read a more advanced book, and will provide a more detailed report. The other great thing about this project is that, as the children read each others' posters they discover great new books to read, and that makes for a happy teacher.

 

Brain Hats

Grade 4K has recently finished learning about the human body and particularly about the nervous, respiratory, digestive, and circulatory systems. One of the fun activities that we did to help the children learn about the nervous system was making "brain hats". First they coloured all the parts, then comes cutting, followed by glueing, and finally putting it all together. Here are a couple of snapshots of the process and one of the finished products.