School is officially in full swing for both of us and things are going really well. Our classes have a very different flavor than last year, but overall in a very positive direction! The quarter is super short (ends in mid October) so we are trying to cram in as much as we can to get balanced grades.
Our new extended day program has been amazing and we have both enjoyed our involvement in it. It's a much more organized and centrally directed after school program and students pay a flat fee to take as many classes as they want. Matt's doing a Russian history/vocab building class (odd combo, I know!) and I have been doing two Lit Circles and an ELL class.
My Lit Circles are one of the highlights of my life right now, which is a huge blessing. Essentially, they are a sort of reading club for High school and Junior high. The High school is reading Howl's Moving Castle, which I love very much, and the Junior high is reading The Dark is Rising. For our last HS Lit club I had them bring hats and we described what kind of person would wear each and then acted as that person, since the main character of the book is a hatter. Tomorrow, we will be eating bacon and listening to Welsh music. :-) So we're reading the book out loud and at home and just doing fun things in class! There will be pictures later! For ELL, we are doing vocab and grammar that I am taking from the book Among the Hidden. Using direct words and sentences from an actual book is my favorite way of doing grammar so this class is nice as well.
We had our first youth group last Friday and that was a lot of fun as well. With our teeny tiny high school almost everyone was there. We had a good message about new beginnings and then rounds of a game the students called Chinese swordfight. You link hands with someone else and try to poke them with your first finger. Matt and I tried it; I use both hands but still lost. :-P
Chinese swordfight!
Another exciting time at our house: we had a tiny hole open up in our main pipe yesterday. It is amazing how much water can come out of a hole the size of a toothpick! So we tried to tape it but to no avail and called our wonderful landlord. About every hour we had to run the towels through the spin cycle because they were soaked and try to mop more water off of the floor. But, in an amazingly short stretch of time the emergency service people put a cuff on it and the leak is fixed! Today we even had a "master" (their phrasing for a professional at a certain service) come and look at it and he said the pipe would not need to be replaced or anything! Another huge blessing in all of this was the fact that the hole could have only occurred after we got home based on the amount of water, and so it hadn't been flooding while we were at school or anything.
One final fun "event" that I've been attempting to do this year is painting my nails to match a book once the class finishes it. I'm not doing it for every book and it depends on how busy we are, but so far I've done two books! The 9th grade was the first with The Old Man and the Sea.
Clockwise: the birds that the old man feels sorry for, the Portuguese man-o-war, the great Marlin, the turtles that the old man loves.
And the 7th grade just finished Walk Two Moons tonight, so I did my nails this afternoon.
They say "Huzza, Huzza" which comes up a lot in the book and are the last two words, and they have blackberries growing out of the letters.
Next week we have our annual spiritual retreat. Matt and I have been on the group that has been planning that and we are definitely excited about what is coming up. The theme is "Close Encounters" and will focus on how to become closer to God and to the others in the high school. Pray that this will be a good time for them to become closer as a group, especially since our numbers are so small and this is the perfect time for it!
Thank you everyone who has been praying for the school year and for Matt and I!
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