I Want to Be Me

We just got our power back after a few days of darkness. Yayyy for being able to heat water for tea and breakfast tomorrow morning! When the guy told me he wouldn´t be able to make it out the last couple of nights my first response was, "and how am I supposed to heat water for coffee?!" But here I sit with internet and a light over my head, very thankful for a house with electricity. We had such a fun day at school today! The kids are learning about is and are and I´m trying to do more fun activities to keep things interesting. We read a book called When I Grow Up I Want to Be Me by Sandra Magsamen and I´m not sure who enjoyed it more, me or the kiddos. It is a wonderful book with cute illustrations and a lovely image. The whole thing is written in a pretty scripted font, which had me wondering if it wasn´t one of those air-quoted children´s books meant more for the adults.

Beky wants to be a teacher. Nathaly wants to be a singer, and she sang a lovely song for Miss Maryann and me today. Samantha wants to be a ballet teacher. Her students will call her Miss Samantha, and they´ll all wear long purple tutus. 

As we read we talked about following our dreams, and reaching for the stars. The kids were too cute mocking me reaching their little arms up as far as they would go. I loved that it talked about each day being filled with adventure and fun. That´s one of my new life mottoes (I really don´t like the look of the e in that word!), so it was totally fun talking about it with my kids! That page had a little pop-up of squares for the days of the week. Each day showed something doing something new and excited and we let out a little "Woo!" of excitement as we lifted each square. I think next week I might do some sort of "week of adventure" project with them. How fun would that be? They got really into the story, so it would be fun to develop it more over next week. It went on to talk about turning to nature and your surroundings for comfort when you feel frightened or alone, which totally touched my heart. AND it talked about loving who you are, and especially loving who you see, illustrated with a woman smiling at her reflection in the mirror. We should all be so brave! Is brave the word? Maybe confident is a better word, but I think it takes a bit of bravery to fully and truly love being YOU. That part of the story sparked my theme for Friday´s Art class--Self Portraits! I´m super excited, and I´m sure another post will be in order.

Dulce and Lissie both want to be artists. These girls are something else!

After we read the story we talked about the amazing power of their imaginations. It is so fun to chat with them about prayer and the importance of talking to God; I always find myself so blown away at their answers. I believe it´s important to truly see the life you want and believe that it is already yours. Anything that comes to your imagination is possible, and the love you shower over any situation or idea is what drives the outcome. So I had the kids write in present tense, rather than future, about the them thirty years from now. Their eyes got all big picturing themselves in their late thirties, and a few snickered at how OLD the miss will be. Or is as one of them corrected. It is incredibly cute to see the kids light up talking about what they want to do and who they want to be. Even my slow workers had their pencils moving today! Estela drew herself as a teacher writing math problems on the board, and she made it 2-digit addition with regrouping, and was super-concentrated making sure she had all the correct answers. Tell me that´s not adorable! Sometimes I wonder how a real teacher would work her lesson plans for different topics, because I´m sure there are all sorts of strategies. But I tell you what, with my second language learners, it is very neat to read them a story and let them draw a picture writing a sentence about what they read. I love watching their vocabulary grow, but it´s honestly just nice getting to see deeper levels of their personalities.

Monica, Daniela and Samantha each want to be teachers. They also want to be stylists who own their own beauty salons, singers and I´m pretty sure Daniela and Samantha had it down that they´d like to be song writers. Jefry and Roberto (back row) want to be soldiers. Cristian David wants to be a police officer, and I hope to always remember seeing just how proud they were when they told me. 

We started with the prompts "I am..." "My family is..." "We are..." Most of the I am´s ended with various professions. The most common response for My family is was happy which was obviously adorable. We are probably had the most variation.  2A was relatively generic, but 2B kept using all the same adjectives and not really giving it much thought. So I threw out a few different ideas and apparently said blessed at some point down my list of potential adjectives. Do you have any idea how warming it is to read a kid´s notebook and have it say "I am a teacher. My family is big and happy. We are blessed." I know, I know, I´m sensitive. But I love it!