The Second Semester Starts

The camera was left at home (sorry, no pics!) but it was another home schooling day for Sue and the boys, and I taught at the University for the second time this week - the first week of the  new semester!

It was wonderful to see all of our students again this week - a few of them had troubles with the bad weather over the holiday; one boy had to stay at a train station 2 nights, but most were unbothered and unscathed. 

This semester I have 2 groups of students for 3 hours in a row, which is a lot of English for them, and a lot of talking for me!  I have been experimenting by breaking up the time playing various word games. Today we played "CONSTANTINOPLE", where I broke up the class into 2 teams and each time had to come up with the longest word they could think of for each letter.  One point per letter was given, with 0 points for any misspelled words.  Harsh!  The students of course love ANYTHING involving competition, and one team beat the other today by ONE LETTER.  When they added their scores, there was a shriek of outrage and disappointment :).  For most of the competitive activities I have been handing out chocolate to the winners to sweeten the pot.

I also passed out some candy hearts from Valentine's Day and explained the sayings, "Head over Heals", "Guess Who?", "Friends 4 Ever", "No Way", etc.  The students enjoyed this as they do with anything involving candy!

Peter and Jack are getting schooled on math, American history, geography, and Chinese.  They even spoke some Chinese to our ayi today, so we feel like they are finding their groove now with home schooling!  This afternoon was a visit to the park and Sue's Polish friend who speaks Chinese very well, much to the Chinese's surprise.  Peter flew his helicopter around at the park and broke a rotor, so he's done flying for awhile.  Sophie is continuing to love her school, and Friday night I have some kind of parents' meeting which should be equally interesting and unintelligible.  I may get one of our Chinese friends to come with me to help me understand everything being said!