Flower, Bat, BOOM!

The first picture is of me as a Zombie at our pub stall and the second is a group of cuties after they learned the time warp with me.

Sunday was another really busy day of teaching. I taught my oldest group of students the time warp during the last ten minutes of class. I let them watch the original version from the movie. They had fun practicing it with me. I even got them singing along and they didn't want to leave the room even though I had to go teach my next class. The long weekend is worth it to teach that group of students.

After work, I went to pick up pizzas for a few of us that wanted to get ready for our pub crawl together. We ate pizza and did our make up. Marie made up my face and Laura did my hair all crazy! It was really fun. We watched some Rocky Horror while we were getting ready.

We took two cabs over to the famous bar street that were meeting our other EF people at. Even though it was highly publicized, no other EF kids and teens teachers came. It was just us from Beijing 3 and maybe two dozen people from the Smart Schools that teach adults. It was nice to meet some of the smart school teachers. I was hoping maybe some of the boys that arrived at the same time I did would be there, but they weren't.

I got to work early the next day to meet Ryan to work on the small stars Halloween party. We were busy all day running around getting supplies to various rooms and making a much better check in process. We decided to have the teachers rotate from room to room instead of making the little ones move and having utter mass chaos. We were predicting it was going to be mass chaos anyway. I was doing face painting and it took me awhile to figure out how I could make it portable. I finally decided that I would just let the students choose between a bat and a flower. I said "Bat, flower, BOOM" to Ryan who thought it was funny. He kept explaining how the teachers would have to quickly make it through their activity quickly by emphasizing with "Bat, flower, BOOM!" It became the catch phrase of the evening!

After a pep talk to our hardworking group of TAs, eating the dumpling dinner on EF, and changing into my "hippie" costume it was go time. We had placed the children into groups based on age and I began with the tiny ones, the blue small stars, who are about two to three years-old. I do not have a blue small star class so it was fun to be with such tiny ones. I quickly gave up on the flower choice and just gave everyone bats on their faces. They got to pick the color of the bat, though. The tiny ones were much more interested in the glitter! There was glitter everywhere by the time I left that first room.

The next six rooms were all a bit of blur. I got in, put on "It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown" and face painted it up! It was fun seeing my students dressed up and in a new situation. The last class I went into was the oldest group of students and a few random students that we weren't given any information about. It was the craziest room. Of course, half of them were from some of my zanier classes, including the violent one and the "old soul" big Leo. There was only one TA in that room, the only male TA we have, and he looked so exhausted and stressed. Those kids were so nutso that they didn't even get to pick out the color. I quickly gave out their little prizes and certificates and sent them on their way.

The parents picked up the students pretty quickly and they were all out of there quickly compared to all the stragglers we had with the older group. We all gathered in the hall and took a deep breath. Miles kept saying, "Let's never do that again, ok?" We all gave a shout out to the TAs and started a mass clean up! Our aiyes worked so hard that day cleaning up!

Laura took some of us out for beers and a late snack afterwards were got to decompress and tell our own funny stories from the night. We even had tallied how many students were crying in the rooms that we went into! We declared the evening a success, though!

Then, I went home and slept for a long time!

Today was about re-charging a bit. I slept in, talked to my Mom for a long time, went to the gym and did some grocery shopping. It was a well appreciated day off.

P.S.- Hi Aunt Theresa and Uncle Leo! I got the present yesterday! I love it. It was such an awesome surprise. Thank you so much. I really appreciate it.