Winter Camp and Winter Break

Winter Break\Chinese New Year is coming. Chinese New Year starts February 6 and ends February 11. Now that's the way to have New Years. It's a big travel time all over Taiwan because most everyone goes home. Lots of businesses are closed during the time.

Annie and I will go to the beautiful east coast for four nights at a couple of B&Bs. We'll go January 26th -30th, before the big Taiwanese travel rush.

It's Winter Camp at Future Heir. (Nice for me, just 12 teaching hours an plenty of planning time for next semester.)

This is one week where some of the students - about 10-20% come for a week of "fun" and learning. The theme this year is the Olympics since the Olympics are being held in China this year. However, my part of winter camp is to teach regular reading curriculum to a different 1st grade. This is okay since I've taught this curriculum before and I don't have to do a lot of research. I did change the lessons thought to adapt to lower-ESL-level kids. Yesterday was the first day and I was quite the hard-ass. I had one boy cry for about 1\2 hour, but he came around and had a good time.

We're reading a story from their Houghton Mifflin book called "The Kite." It's a good news\bad news type story. The good news is . . . We ended up writing our own good news\bad news story about going to Tom Dragon (Tom Dragon is a giant play ground with 1000s of colored balls and tunnels similar to what you see in Mac Donald's indoor playgrounds.)

Today we'll review the story and everyone will make a kite.