My Classroom & the Playground

We finally visited the school today. I got to see my room:



The playground:



The school is absolutely amazing. The hallways and rooms are decorated with Chinese things (statues, wall hangings, furniture, etc.). The playground was redone recently and cost around 3 million dollars. That dragon blows smoke out of his nostrils. There is a lot more to the playground than what those four photos show. There is a waterfall, dinosaur bone dig area, greenhouse, several tennis courts, basketball courts, four gyms, lots of fields, 60-72 buses (I've heard different reports), a few cafeterias, 2 or 3 libraries, lounges, etc. The buses are not like school buses at home. These are nice charter buses in the school colors of blue and white.

Our lower elementary classrooms have SmartBoards, document cameras, PhonicEar with surround sound (lapel mics and hand-held microphones that project your voice all over the classroom), tons of books, manipulatives, and other supplies. There are at least 2 desktop computers and a teacher laptop per classroom and the school has several laptop carts for check out. The school is working on getting laptops for each student in the future.

I've been fighting the cough my darling sister gave me and a bit of jetlag. It's not too bad, I just want to go to bed at 8pm and wake up at 4am. I've been trying to stay up later but then I need a nap at around 6pm.

I still have some shopping I need to do. None of us were able to purchase sharp knives at IKEA or any other larger store in the past few days. We found out that it is because they were all taken off the shelves because of the incident last week. We should be able to get them after all the excitement dies down here.

--Sarah--