So I haven't posted anything in awhile... Here we go.

I can start with school. It going pretty well. Teaching is actually a lot more interesting than I originally thought. Personally, I really like watching the kids during all the lessons. I think my new favorite game is "Who would that be back home?" After Day 3, you can tell who the nerds are, the popular ones, the class clown is a little trickier to spot because of the language barrier, etc. It's probably bad that I'm stereotyping in a sense, but that's what my eyes see. This is probably one of my favorite moments of teaching so far:

The First Grade Class: The other day we were working on a writing exercise. Writing this like "What is it?" "It's a blue lorry." "What is it?" "It's a green pencil." Super repetitive, but they really need it. I keep forgetting how little these kids are. Anyway, there is this one girl, Lizi, who comes off as a true space cadet. (I hope you all get my reference) Most of the time she seems like she's following along but she's in another world entirely. I didn't notice it at first but after my co-teacher pointed her out, I've been tending to concentrate on her a little more to make sure that she's still with us. For the most part. Well on this day, I had written on the board:
What is it? It's a yellow train.
What is it? It's a green car.
Basically, these kids just had to copy this down in there books. Surprise, Surprise. These kids were so confused! So many questions. It took the entire class period (35 minutes) for these kids to get it. After walking around and individually helping some of them, I hear my co-teacher congratulating Lizi! The one kid who is usually not paying any attention, is the one kid that actually writes everything down the way that they were supposed to! It was awesome. Then I got to give out my first "diploma"! We call them stickers. She was so happy! And all the other kids were jealous and began frantically scribbling things down. It was so funny. I now know, never underestimate the power of a sticker when it comes to movtivating 5-year-olds.

Mostly, my role at school has not changed too much. I still do a lot of the reading exercises. Yay for being a human tape player! It's surprisingly hard to do anything else with the younger kids. They need a lot of translation. But their cuteness makes up for their cluelessness. I have been compling a list of ideas for lesson plans to present to my co-teachers to liven up the classroom. So far I have:
-Telephone (to work on their speaking and listening)
-Paragraphs with errors that they need to correct (for the older kids)
-word jumble (forming sentences)
-Pictionary/Charades
-Jeopardy
Things of this nature. Now I realize that it's going to be interesting because not only do I need to explain these things to the kids, but I have to explain it to my co-teachers as well. I'll let you know how that all goes.

Big update on my host family! Tuesday at dinner, I was asking Maya (my host mom), who I have an up-and-down relationship with, what this jam was made from. I mean, what type of fruit it was. She had no idea what the english word was, so she got out a "lexicon"... I say dictionary. She attempted to go through and find it. Then before I know it, we're going through the entire book and she's attemping to teach me Georgian! It was great! I feel like we bonded a little bit more. This was the moment I was waiting for, waiting like 3 weeks. I don't know how much I retained. She went through A LOT of vocab. Let me stress that one more time. A LOT. I just hope that she doesn't think that I'm fluent or anything. She did start to just ramble off a bunch stuff at one point... That was funny, all I could do was laugh because I had no idea what she was saying. I kept asking her to slow down, but she would then get even more excited and speed up again. Well that's all I really wanted from my host family, an attempt to teach me. Maybe I will come back to the States with some knowledge of Georgian. :)

Originally my plans for the weekend involved some TLG visitors. After reviewing the weather forecast for Batumi, that visit has been post-poned. My weekend is wide open. Maybe I'll take another crack at running. I went running yesterday and my calves did not approve. It was super frustating! Maybe I'm not meant to exercise here. Ha! Well get ready calves, you're in for another workout this weekend!

Until next time. Adventure is out there!