Today is International day! I woke up very early to get into school with Doreenda for 7.30am as we both needed help with our costumes. Doreenda was dressing up in a toga and I was dressing up in a sari. One of the other teachers (whose sari I was borrowing) helped me into it and safety pinned it all together, then with a marker pen did a sort of henna tattoo design on my hands and head, with one design meaning that I was married (sorry Matt!) By 8am I was ready and went off to greet the children and their parents. All of the children had dressed in the colours of the Indian flag, or were dressed in traditional Indian clothes. We all went outside to sit on the field for the opening ceremony, every class was dressed up in outfits for the country they were doing projects on and all looked really good.
After the opening ceremony, grades 1 and 2 went to the auditorium to each give a presentation, grade 1A was first with the tiger poem we had been practicing all week and they all wore the tiger masks that I had bought in Shanghai. Other classes all did their presentations, including songs, readings and a hockey demonstration.
Each class had a schedule of things to do throughout the day including music, art, IT, a football match against the rest of their grade, food courts (where parents from each class had bought in food from that country) and a tour of the school looking at each classes displays.
It was a fun but exhausting day and the parents were sometimes more badly behaved than the kids. We had been given the schedule so that everyone got to see everything but parents would just take their kids off without telling us and then the teachers would think that they had lost a child, or interrupt a lesson because they think their child needed a snack and drink, even though in 10 minutes we had a scheduled snack break at the food court! The day was a bit chaotic. Then during the football match there were seven players on the pitch (we have 13 in the class which means rotating the children on and off the pitch throughout) One child refused to come off the pitch and his mum who was on the sideline just said “oh let him play” how is that setting a good example? Also, the amount of times I saw parents barging kids from other grades out of the way so that they could walk up the stairs next to their child was unbelievable! By 2pm I had had enough really so after dropping the kids off for their IT lesson I went downstairs and hid in the office for 20 minutes, no wonder most of these kids are spoilt and don’t know how to share when their parents behaved worse than them today.
The day ended at 3.20pm (a lot of parents had decided to just take their kids home before this time though so by 2.30pm we only had 7 kids left) after saying bye to everyone and then putting the classroom tables back where they should be we decided to all go out for dinner to celebrate that the stressful week was finally over. We went to a restaurant not far from the school called the Iron Horse, I had never been before (and I have no intention of going back, it was a very bad and limited menu of a cheeseburger, pepperoni pizza, hotdog or taco) I did have a nice evening but I was glad to go home at 7pm and I even had an early night after an enjoyable but exhausting day.
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