good morning from what has been a great weekend and wonderful weekend here! this was the end of my two weeks in full control, everything went well i think and i hope we had some fun stuff happening and it was so awesome to be talking about the olympics with these kids. they have the best things to say about the athletes and the way things work in the olympics. one little boy in my class loves michael phelps and even wrote one day about how he was the world's best swimmer, it was awesome and so cute! we have been building an olympics wall with headlines from the newspaper each day and discussing events from the previous day. its been cool. and its been fun to see it from new zealand's perspective of being such a small country, i forget how huge america is compared to most places around the world and even though its so big i still get so excited about the little things because i'm so far away from home. been cheering for the kiwi's though which has been lots of fun too!

on thursday we had our "olympicathon" which was awesome. we had an opening ceremony in the hall with everyone where they lit an olympic torch and played some videos and such, it was really neat and well put together. the students wore their house colors which was cool, made me feel like i was in harry potter again. basically the year levels were divided up and did a rotation of activities for 8 minutes each for an hour. we did "horse racing" i'll post some pictures. it was hilarious though because it was all of year0 and some of year2 the kids were cracking me up. they got really into it which made it even better. my class was obviously first at our rotation and after one down and back run some of them were saying "miss anderson i'm a bit tired" haha they're so tiny. i'll post some pictures. i had a great time getting to see all the other classes and encourage them to cheer each other on and such. it was a little drizzly (because it rained allll week, nothing new) and the seniors were on the field and were so so muddy. they were just having the best time though. it was an awesome day!

the kids were exhausted after a long day on thursday but fridays are always fun with year0 assembly and then we got to go outside of the hall and do jump jams. i got some videos the kids are so cute doing them! it was a fun start to the day. later we worked on graphs and made a graph of all the countries that are represented in our room. first though i showed each flag (which i had tried my hardest to replicate on small little pieces of paper) talked about the country and some of the students who had actually lived there came up to tell us something about their country. it was adorable they were so proud of where they are from, and they had the most random things to say about it. what a great opportunity for them to share with their peers though! then we made our graph, a little funny since america had 37 medals at this point and new zealand had 3, serbia had 1, samoa had 0 etc... so we had a chat about sportsmanship and how its a honor to be in the olympics no matter what and we should be proud of everyone who is there. we gave a cheer for each country after we talked about their medals, it was great hearing "go china, go china" or "go south africa, go south africa" they were awesome about it all.

afterschool we headed to the pub to have drinks for caitlin's last day. it was a lot of fun to have a big group together. its so strange that she's leaving ah i can't believe it! i only have 4 weeks of teaching left, i'm trying not to think about it quite yet. wanted to share some videos of my kids and i finally got a recording of everyone singing the national anthem. check down on previous posts because i'm going to try to upload the kids doing kapa haka when greeting the international students last week.

lighting the olympic torch.

horse racing...

year 0 jump jams!

some of us at the pub on friday.

saturday we went shopping in town which was fun because i got to see some of the cute little back streets with vintage and boutique shops. it was Sue's birthday so we all came back and went to her house to celebrate which was of course lots of fun! (i'm adding a picture of the 2footer box of premade shots, provided a good bit of fun) sunday was full of family activities, a big breakfast, a huge grocery shop, laundry etc. great weekend here!

lunch on saturday. happy birthday sue!