Back Again!

Well, Guatemala was fun! We had no trouble traveling there or back (or in the country, for that matter). We learned interesting things and have much to think about for next year's trip. They're talking about going again at the beginning of June. I already have travel plans at that time, so I won't be going along, but perhaps a future trip.

My students missed me while I was gone. Their parents told me so at church on Sunday, especially the 7-8th grade parents... that was a bit unexpected! One mom told me I'm never allowed to leave again because they miss me so much!

The reformation service went well. My kiddos said their parts wonderfully and knew their song verse the best out of all the grades. Our bell songs... eh, the first one was a bit of a disaster. It's a challenging version of "A Mighty Fortress" and we had trouble getting it down during practice. Miss S did the best she could practicing with them this week, but having a huge audience at church psyched them out and they got lost and kept messing up and all we could do was keep playing... Yeah, we've had better performances. But the point is to give glory to God, so even though it wasn't the best sounding song, our hearts were in the right place.  On the other hand, the song we played for offering was great!

The mixed choir song at the end of the service sounded great too... quite a few of my kids commented on it after church and even at school today. It's called, "Here I Stand" and includes quotes from Martin Luther including his famous words, "Here I stand, I can do no other." The song ends with a high A for sopranos (optional) and each week we practiced I thought about trying to hit it, but I wasn't confident. Practicing before the service I gave it a shot and nailed it! Woo! So I ended the song on a high note ;) and hit it then too.

School today was pretty good. My kiddos literally ran into the classroom (still in their hats and coats) to say good morning to me. It felt good to be loved. The first 15 minutes of the day were spent complaining about the sub... not that she was bad, she was just stricter than I am and she wouldn't let them use the iPad to look up words the whole week, so spelling took extra long, and she wouldn't help them on their homework, they had to figure it out for themselves, and they had to be super duper quite during their rounds and she made them split up if they whispered too loud and she did lunch count weird... haha, I can't remember all the stuff they said. But I think the week went better than they made it sound, and I think they liked her more than they made it sound too.

They did say she didn't read our read-aloud book much while I was gone. They said she didn't seem too in-to the story and only read a few pages. And she didn't do the voices of the characters so they couldn't tell who was saying what. She ended up reading them other books, like a Martin Luther book I had left out on the podium. Can't say I'm sad about that. Now they learned more about Martin Luther and I get to read my favorite parts of our book!!!

In summary, it's good to be back.

The other exciting thing we did today was carve pumpkins! Mrs. B had about 20 left in her garden and she offered as many to me as I could use. So I brought 12 over to school over the weekend before the hard frost came. One pumpkin had frozen a little and was a bit mushy. One pumpkin was too thick and hard to cut into, so we left that one. It's a good thing I brought extras!

It worked out perfectly because the 7-8th graders were gone in the afternoon for a field trip to drug court (trials/hearings for people arrested for drug use/possession).  No math, which gave us an extra hour to use up... art time!

I brought a few knives from home to cut the tops out, but otherwise we used the dissecting kits at school, specifically the scalpels (they're not that sharp). Most of the pumpkins were under-ripe so their skin was tough to cut into. Still, we made it work! We had to get creative with fixing bits where too much was cut away or attaching bits that fell off with toothpicks. I think they turned out great.