Happy Thanksgiving!

      Preschool had lots of fun last week getting ready for Thanksgiving. To start with, I had to explain the holiday to them, as the idea of Thanksgiving in Haiti is quite different than what is celebrated in the United States. In Haiti, Thanksgiving is referred to as "Fèt Kodenn" (roughly translated, "Turkey Celebration"). Somehow, a story was circulated that every year on Thanksgiving day, turkeys fall from the sky, and Americans eat them. I'm not kidding. 

   So, in an attempt to clear up the confusion (at least for my students), I told them that Thanksgiving is a day when we thank God for everything he has given us, especially family and friends. I also told them that in America we like to have a big meal with our families to celebrate, and we do in fact eat turkey (but it comes from a store, and not the sky). 

   On Tuesday, we drew pictures of things we are thankful for (family, houses, food, and boats were popular choices), and made turkey hats. 

Kaylenn and Gabriella in their turkey hats.

Victorine showing off her hat.

Mike drawing pictures of what he's thankful for: his mom, his house, and food.

Making handprint turkeys.

Not all of the feathers made it on the turkeys. :)

Meet the Preschoolers

   This post is dreadfully overdue, but I finally managed to get pictures of all of my kids and get them uploaded and arranged in a blog post (and I'm not sure which of the two tasks was more difficult).  Here is my Preschool class of 2014-2015!

Rodlyn

Elizabeth

Waylene

Charljude

Victorine

Gleen

Jemima

                     

Kaylenn

Sammy

Himmler

Stacey

Vienji

Hadassa

Ben

Lordjina

Gabriella

Gabriel

Hertzley

Joanide

Ashanti

Chris

Thaicha

Jonathan

Nebby

Sarah

Wensky

Wildjena

Claude

All-Kassy

Mike

                           

   Geha

Fall Fun

   We're learning about the different seasons in Preschool right now, and how they change throughout the year. This is sometimes a hard concept for my kids to grasp, because the weather stays mostly the same year-round in Haiti. Snow and ice, leaves turning red and yellow-these are all things they have never experienced.  So for the past month, we've tried to bring a little bit of fall to our classroom. We decorated with fall leaves, made pumpkins, and yesterday we had a Fall party. We played games, colored fall-themed worksheets, and had leaf and pumpkin shaped cookies for snack. Here are some snapshots of our day (minus the cookies, which disappeared before I could get a picture).

Himmler. I'm completely in love with this guy. :)

Fall vocabulary words on the board. They had to pick a letter from the
bubble that made the sound at the beginning of the word.

Rodlyn, Jemima and Victorine

Thaicha

Charljude

K is for Kite

   Since the beginning of Preschool, we've been working our way through the alphabet. We practice letter recognition and sounds, and tracing and writing the letters. We've also been making crafts to go along with each letter. Recently, we studied letter K, and made kites.

   We traced the letters on the kites, and then decorated them. We added yarn for the tails and bows.

Sammy decorating his kite.

Geha

    After we finished making our kites, we lined up and walked out to the school yard to fly them. As you can see from the pictures, we had a lot of fun!

Gleen

Thaicha

Posing for the camera. :)

Music

      This is my second year teaching music at Sonlight, and I'm enjoying it immensely.  On Wednesdays I teach 2nd and 3rd grades during school, and I do an after-school class with 4th, 5th, and 6th grades. We've been learning about notes and rhythms, and how to read sheet music; we've listened to some famous pieces like "Für Elise" and "The Carnival of the Animals", and learned about their composers. These kids are so much fun to work with, and I love getting to share my love of music with them. Below are some pictures from the week we studied Beethoven.

Steeve

Levi and Sephora

Bonard and his Haitian Beethoven :)