First lesson!

So here's the scoop. Normally I set my alarm for 6:46 to get up and get ready for school. This morning I decided to give myself a few extra minutes and set it for 6:56. My body woke up at 6:46 on its' own. FAIL. Anyway, I got dressed, ate, and rode my bike to school. I taught in a third year English class this morning. It was a double block class, so I ended up teaching for about 1 hour and 45 minutes. I combined my 2 lesson plans on Missouri and middle school. I had the students read a book about the main cities/monuments in Missouri. We then discussed the University of Missouri and college life. After that I handed out letters from middle school students in Columbia talking about American schools, and I passed around my 8th grade yearbook and talked about my middle school experiences having to do with school and activities. They then started writing letters back to them. Obviously I ran into a few minor bumps in terms of words that I had to explain. This was difficult without knowing what words were in Italian, haha. Some of the things that I needed to explain in more detail were Truman Sports Complex, the different degrees you can get in college (Bachelor's, Master's, and PHD) and the No-Touch-Policy. Haha. They were also very interested to know how many people went to Mizzou, what majors there were, and what the rules were in college about touching since there is the No-Touch when you're younger. Then after all the discussion, they started to write letters back to the students who wrote to them. Hopefully they will finish the letters soon and I will be able to take them back to Columbia. Even if there is no way to get them to the students until August, I am still going to try to get them to the kids who wrote in the first place just because I think it would be really cool. After this class we took a break, and then we went to another class where we helped the kids finish up their e-pals messages and figure out how they were going to send their pictures to their e-pals (a video vs scrapbook pages with their pictures, etc). I got home from school around 1:00. Alessandra made Asia and I pasta with red sauce and tuna for lunch.

This afternoon I had a meeting with all of the other American students like we do every Wednesday. We got there and spent time reflecting on our teaching and family life. We also split off into our inquiry project groups. My group is doing ours on the e-pal project at Fassi. It's nice because we have first hand experience with it. After our meeting we walked to the Pizza place. This week was "sibling" week but unfortunately Asia had dance class so she couldn't come. A lot of other girls had their siblings there, so the ones of us who didn't have ours there just interacted with them. Alison's host brother ate 2 WHOLE pizza's! HE'S 12!! AND THE SKINNIEST KID I'VE EVER SEEN. It was crazy. After dinner we went to gelato. I had a small strawberry cup. It was good, but I like the more citrus-y flavors better I think. After gelato Laura and I went to wait for her host parents. Laura lives 3 or 4 blocks from me so her parents took me home so that Alessandra wouldn't have to worry about Asia missing her bed time. Problem was, Laura's parents thought we were meeting at one place and we thought we were meeting at another, haha. So it took us 20 minutes of walking around and making weird phone calls to find them! Eventually we did though and we walked to their car. We saw a HUMMER while walking to the car, which Laura and I thought was weird because all of the cars are so small here. Anyway, I got home.. said hello and goodnight to Alessandra and Asia and now I'm watching Hairspray waiting to fall asleep.

Ciao!