Graduation!

It has been quite a week. My kindergartners graduated on Thursday. They all prepared speeches, and performed a play/musical. We have been working on our performances for weeks. We had about ten minutes to practice in the gym where we actually performed it. The mikes didn't really work out, the staging area was smaller than they were used to, and there was no where for them to go "off stage," but overall it went pretty well. My shyest student said a mildly funny line in her speech that the audience laughed at. She didn't know that it was going to be funny, so she thought they were laughing at her. She said about one more sentence then started crying. The good thing was that the sentence that she was able to get out was about missing her friends and teachers, so everyone thought she was crying because she was so sad to leave everyone. Everyone told me that it totally sold the show. I have some partial videos of their play/musical, but a lot of it is cut out. Hopefully I can get a full video of the speeches and show from the school. My kids looked adorable in their caps and gowns, and they all got "diplomas" with class and individual pictures in them.

I will start with a new class this week, in a new classroom. All of the classrooms in the school are city names from the U.S., Canada or Australia. I will be teaching in the Minneapolis classroom from now on! The director didn't even know that's where I am from when she made the assignment. I used to be in Toronto, and I know nothing about Toronto. I am super excited to be able to teach my kids about the classroom that they are in.

I have gotten to see bits and pieces of the Olympics. They showed short track and figure skating events at least 40 times over, and just a few bits of everything else. It was a lot of fun being able to root for two countries. I'm sure that I will get some ribbing from all of my Canadian coworkers tomorrow over the hockey game.

More next week!

Quote of the week: (Students are asked to write vocabulary words in a sentence. One of the words was "undressed." Don't ask me why they have that as a vocabulary word for kindergartners.) "One million years ago people lived undressed."