A Welcomed Weekend!

I'm excited it is the weekend, it means sleeping in, until 8:15 that is, no workout in the morning and enjoying a relaxing day tomorrow.

Today I started a new unit titled Safety. This morning went well and I was pretty productive. I laid out what information I wanted taught, or at least had originally planned. I found some good activity sheets and information on helmet safety and was on roll. I paused for lunch and a little siesta.

During siesta, Julie was working with Jessica on spelling words for the spelling bee that they were going to have in English class later in the afternoon. After Julie headed upstairs, I stayed and spelled with her. It was fun just working with her and seeing how much English she really does know. She is about 11-12 years old and is the youngest in level 4 at the English school. She understands a lot and and speak quite a bit of English which is going to be a great skill for her later in life! We spelled words from air to strawberry to baseball to blanket. She did well with most of the words, although a lot of double letters like diFFicult were hard because she would only say one letter. But I was very impressed and we worked on spelling for about 30-45 minutes!

Before spelling with her some of the little kids were out and wanted tickled of course. Luis Alberto was standing in front of my lap at one point and picked a nasty booger and wiped it on the chair where Jessica was sitting. It was disgusting so I showed her and she called over one of the workers. She made him wipe it with his hand and then basically carried him by his arms over to the sink to wash his hands! Gross little boys! :)

After lunch I tried finding information in English and Spanish on seat belt safety. For 1-2 hours I found nothing and finally gave up and quit working for the afternoon. I've now decided to completely rearrange this unit because teaching Dominicans to wear seat belts and helmets is going to be like teaching Dominicans to not drop their "s"'s when they speak. Dominican Spanish is very sloppy so instead of saying "Esta Bien" they would say "'ta bien" because they drop the s and essentially drop the "e" before it. So, anyway, I've decided after wasting the afternoon to change the unit! Oops!

Heather and I went to hang out with the kids for a little while before dinner time. I saw Arianni's three stitches on her forehead, but she left because she was not interested in talking about this. I played for a little while on the slide with some of the little girls and then sat with Jessica again for a while. She didn't tell me she won her spelling bee, but I found out later from Julie she had won. Guess our practice helped! Oh, side note, as I was coming up with words, she kept trying to add letters to the end. For example, I said beautiful and she would say beautifully, and she tried to say sloppily was a word. Not sure because my English skills are diminishing day by day but don't think those are proper words!

For dinner we ate a the restaurant connected to Hostel San Fernando where Cameron is staying. We had a little buffet style dinner of french fries, tostones (plantains), fried chicken, and crab. It was tasty. The crab was meat stewed with some vegetables and had some small bones in it. A little different than normal crab, but it was good and something different! They have a nice pool at the hostel and we went outside, took some pictures and just chilled by the pool for a bit. On the way home we stopped by the English Institute.

The street that it is on participates in a Christmas decorating contest every year. So, we stopped and got out to look at the lights. It made me really excited for Christmas! They have a huge wall set up at the front of the street that looks like the Catholic Church in town and only has an opening large enough for motos to pass so the street is half shut down, at least to cars or bigger. In the middle of the street they have alternating "candles" that are my height and trees with lights. The house next door to the Institute has an awesome upstairs deck/patio and they have some great looking decorations. We hung out for 5-10 minutes with some of the neighborhood kids that know everyone and then we headed back.

We played some Apples to Apples tonight before calling it a night. This weekend will be fun. We are having a birthday party for the kids tomorrow night, and headed to Cabarete (a beach/touristy town) on Sunday for a "vacation" day!