Back in China.......In the Classroom.

OK I am going to get serious about finishing up my China trip. I may post several blogs in a row. We have VBS next week, so I need to get this finished. :)

After our Pagoda run we headed back for a rest. :) Needless to say my calves hurt for the next 3 days. We then headed out for a quick bite to eat before going to the schools for the first time. We were going in for their evening classes. They start at 7:30 in the morning and go until 10:00 pm. They do have two big breaks during the day. We got there during their free time. All of the kids either play basketball, table tennis (ping pong), badmitton, or just hang out.

We had three girls that were basketball players that jumped in and play with them. They quickly drew a crowd! I struck up a game of badmitton with some girls. I wasn't very good at first, but quickly got the hang of it.

After that we headed to the classrooms. We taught two classes the first night. I was a little nervous and did not know exactly what to expect. These kids had been studying English for several years. They read and write it, but have not had much practice actually speaking. So they were thrilled to get to talk to foreigners. We went in the classrooms and you would have thought we were rockstars! They would clap and yell for us. We told a little about our families, and then worked on simple english with them. Things such as colors, days of the week, months of the year, antonyms (which they were really good at), tongue twisters, etc. One of their favorite things was learning colors with starbursts. :) What cracked us up was the way they pronounced orange. They would all say Orang-E. So we taught them that the e was silent. They always wanted to know if we could speak Chinese. We learned a little, and of course they would laugh at us when we would try to speak. It was fun! We were able to teach in the schools for 5 days.

Our quick dinner before heading to the schools.
Katie thought it would be funny to eat the chicken head. She put it in her mouth, but quickly spit it back out- Chicken!!
Katie going for a lay up.

T shooting for three. The would cheer everytime one of us made a basket.


Dream (his english name), Kayla, Connie, and Me. Dream was talking to us and then all of a sudden ran out of the office. Before we knew it he was back with bags of corn for us. I guess he thought we were hungry. It was super hot, but really good. He was overwhelmed that we spoke english, and was so excited to get to talk to us.