The art gallery we went to was called 798

Just for you mom :)

The last few weeks school have been so busy! Lots of planning, grading, and hanging out with students. It has been great, but we got Monday off for Tomb Sweeping day and it was so nice to relax and enjoy a weekday off. It has been in the 70's here and sunny. So yesterday I played soccer for a few hours and I could barely move when I got out of bed this morning. The highlight of the weekend was going to an art area called 798. It is this huge area where they have turned old warehouses into art galleries, and it is free to go in and walk around. I went with some friends and some university students. We had so much fun walking around and taking pictures and enjoying the amazing day.

More exciting news, I just ordered tickets to go to Guilin and Xiamen, these cities are both in southern China. Guilin has lots of mountains and lakes, so we will go down and rent bikes and bike around to see all the sights. Then we are going to Xiamen to go to the beach. We get two weeks off of school for our kids mid terms and May Holiday. I am excited for my upcoming adventures.

My best class yet?

I have been working really hard this semester trying to get through to my lower level juniors. I have major discipline problems with them, they talk all class, they don't bring their books, they never do their homework, and they fail most of the exams. So I have been trying to change things up and figure out what works and what does not. Some of my lessons have failed completely and have been very frustrating, but this week was amazing. All I did was institute trash can basketball, but it was amazing. We were learning about music and that by itself is a much better topic than most of the topics in our book. So they really enjoyed listening to music and learning music terms. We do listening activities with them and this week we let them fill in the blank to High School Musical songs, this was such a hit! They love singing these songs while doing the activity. Although, I had to hear the song 12 times, so I have been singing the same song alllll week, I even wake up singing it!

Along with a good lesson, I let them shoot a piece of paper into my trash can if they answered one of my questions. Then for review if they answered a series of three questions they could crumple up their listening activity and shoot that, I think they almost fell out of their chairs when I let them crush their work. They all loved it and all the boys in my class answered at least two questions, and usually it is only girls who speak in my lower level classes! It is interesting because in my upper level classes basketball did not interest them as much and it is usually the boys who answer questions anyways. However, I did not have to tell my bad class to be quiet one time, it was amazing :)

It is really fun to have a really good lesson it gives you motivation to work hard on the next lesson. It is also fun when you see your students enjoying what they are doing and actually understanding the material. What a rewarding week it has been. All thanks to trash can basketball!

The Lama Temple, they had about 10 different buildings with Buddhas in them.