The first week of school passed by quickly! Actually, all of January passed by quickly!
We spent the 17th through the 22nd with Jeff's dad and pastors from Community Churches in the US. They spent the week visiting churches and the three new church construction sites. That's right, we have three new buildings being constructed!
Jeff and I rode along a few times to visit the church construction sites and took pictures. Jeff filmed interviews with the pasters of many of the churches to show at BRCC. Someone at the church will be editing them together, we hope to get a copy back afterward and post them here. If not Jeff might just make his own edits and post them later.
This first week of school has been good even though we are still waiting on a lot of the English curriculum books to come in. Ordering books has been a long terrible process each year. This year we have been very blessed to have Emily Taylor helped research and contact the book sellers to find the best curriculum for what we need.
Jeff is now the Informatics teacher and he teaches seven classes. Basically first through seventh grades once per week. The first week went well. He is mostly teaching typing right now, since everybody seem to be bad at it. Third grade is a bit big. There are 13 kids and only eight computers. Jeff taught the older kids today and is enjoying those classes because he can teach a little more advanced stuff to them. Like the parts of a computer.
During the time that Jeff wasn't teaching he was working on the International School of Carpina website. This will be for the parents and people interested in knowing about the school. So it is in Portuguese and the content isn't all in the site yet, but he was mainly working on the layout and design. You can check it out at
www.wribrazil.com/escolaLindsay has kept herself super busy and a little stressed. She has been working on getting the school curriculum with little success. Like we said before Emily has been a big help with this.
Lindsay teaches the nursery class. That is right we teach English to toddlers, two years old in this class. She really enjoys teaching the babies and this year we have a really nice new classroom/playroom for them. Newly this year she also teaches the gradeschoolers a daily English class. The children are divided into two groups, older students (forth grade through seventh grade) and younger students (first grade through third grade). From there we divide children further into one of three levels. We don't want some students to feel slow or dumb so instead of telling them what level they are in we've given names to the classes. For first through third grade there are Otters (Lindsay's class), Moose (Jessica's class - she's our newest teacher from the US for the semester), and Okapi (David's class). For the fourth through seventh there are Heroes (Lindsay's class), Gypsies (Jessica's class), and Pirates (David's class). Lindsay also teaches History/Geography in English to each grades once a week in the afternoons and an English class for the teachers and staff. Since we are short staffed our English teachers plan and teach more than 22 English classes a week!
We haven't started helping in Lagoa de Itaenga yet because Pastor Ricardo is still on vacation. But, that has been good because that means we still have some downtime to "relax" (and plan more lessons)!
Please pray for good attitudes for us and the kids as we are teaching. Please pray for God to use us and protect us from evil (there has been a lot of spiritual warfare since we have gotten our visa).
Foundations (all day kindergarten) with their teacher Paula!
Some of our awesome 6th and 7th graders!
