Field Trips!

We are well into the school year flow, and we feel like we've (mostly) hit our stride. Praise The Lord (and THANK YOU for the prayers!)!

This last week and the week before we had field trips. These were the only two field trips we've done this year, so I think it was accidental that they were in two consecutive weeks. Both were an adventure!

The first one was a "science day" field trip hosted by a local university. We think every.single.child between the age of 3 and 18 was present. It was nigh unto insanity! We were given charge of 8 students. Fortunately, the other teachers were very gracious toward us and gave us 8 of the easiest students to handle!

The day started full of anticipation - and rain! All the students showed up in their purple PE uniforms, and the teachers wore their pink shirts. We lined up for our usual routine of singing National Anthem, reciting The Lord's Prayer, singing the King's Anthem, and reciting the school motto. Then everyone got divided into their teams with their adult supervisors, and we loaded up into the vehicles. Grades 4, 5, and 6 rode in the back of one of the very large songtaews, and grades 2 and 3 loaded up into the back of the small songtaews. Grade 1 piled into a 15 passenger van, and off we went on our caravan to the university.

Once we arrived, there was loud music, there were exhibits, there were dance troupes, there were snacks, there were booths, exhibition halls, and 5 buildings on campus to explore. Due to our lack of Thai language reading ability, we mostly just wandered around with our 8 kids trying to keep everyone together and find interesting things for them to do (at which we were only partially successful!) but at least everyone made it back to the lunch rendezvous location :)

Last week we went to a Lanna Heritage day at one of the schools here in Chiang Mai. This event was to celebrate the culture of the Lanna kingdom - formerly Northern Thailand. This event was much smaller than the Science Day. We enjoyed getting to browse through booths selling traditional Lanna style food, watch the kids explore the very large playground, and see some traditional Lanna dancing and games - and a lot of cute little kids in their traditional clothing uniforms (usually worn on Fridays).

One of our first graders getting a little goofy at Lanna Day.

My lunch at Lanna Day.

Playing on the playground.

This week it's been back to normal, although we do have an additional person in our classroom these days:

Jesse, a fellow that came on the team from Longview last month, is here for another few weeks. He's been working a lot with our second graders, who love having him around!

I'll close with this blurry picture of grade three doing a "get your wiggles out" dance. We figured out how to get the to do it: turn it into a competition! Ah, the joys of teaching!