Easter!

This Sunday is Easter, so we decided to do a bit of a party for all of our kids. We have 3 groups of kids: morning (my group) then 2 in the afternoon. There are 6 different classes the kids attend during our 2 hour teaching period, so the Arts and Crafts teacher dedicated 2 days of their lessons to making Easter eggs. We decided to be wise and use paper eggs instead of real eggs with the 6-8 year olds. Each child got to color and decorate 3 paper eggs.

It's always interesting to learn more about how kids work because no matter how much the teacher explained that if they give the eggs back to her after class then they get to hunt for them and get candy in return, they insisted on taking the eggs home to show their parents. It's hard to explain the future to the kids and it's even harder to explain why they should wait for things. My roommate was the Arts and Crafts teacher for the week so the night before she had to make 42 eggs for all the kids that took them home or that snuck back in and stole their eggs later. I wish I could go back to grade school now and give my teachers the credit they deserve.

Our Plan: 

Teach 4 rotation from 9 am- 10:50 am. Retrieve our homeroom kids, count tokens, and explain to them what Easter is and why we are doing a hunt. Then have all of the kids come back into the big gym and line up by class like Opening (10 minutes before classes were we sing songs, go over the day of the week and the weather, and talk about the rules). Then have our Chinese-speaking Head Teacher explain the strict and exact rules of the Hunt. I'm going to insert in right here that it was really neat to watch the excitement grow in the kids' eyes as they listened and prepared for the hunt. Then we let the loose one class at a time and joined in on the festivities once we got outside. The paper eggs were laid out everywhere all around the building and the kids just had a ball! After they found the 3 eggs they exchanged them with our teachers for candy, then they got to continue playing and have fun until 11:30. I'm happy to report that amongst all that fun only 2 kids got hurt and that's merely because they tripped and scratched their hands a bit. Other than that it was so fun and enjoyable. It had been raining for days before the hunt so the ground was a bit wet and the eggs got a little soggy but the rain had stopped long enough for our hunt. Tangent: when it rains here, it pours! There have been lightening and thunder storms these last couple of nights and they are so exciting! The ground just gets flooded when it rains because it rains so much and so heavy! When it's not actually raining but it's stormy the air is misty... super different!

I'm glad the Easter Egg hunt went so well because honestly I was NOT excited for it. The week of the Hunt had been a really hard week. The ILP Director had warned us of this because at the half-way point the kids always start testing boundaries because us teachers often start to become lax and less strict with our rules and routine. The day right before the Hunt day was by far the worse. I had no control of the class, the lessons were a disaster, and the entire class period was spend of me frantically trying to regain control. Thank goodness for wise mothers! Mine shared with me some keys to parenting: immediate discipline, consistency, and reward the good ones. This sounds simple but they were my keys to success; the classes on the day of the Hunt were perfect and my lesson went exactly as I was hoping. Thanks Mom!

Pictures!