Leslee's Big Day

Friday morning when I came to class I was handed an envelope from one of the other teachers. I opened it and inside I found a card from Leslee (one of my previous students and now a tutor student) and her Mom, inviting me to come to Far East Shopping Mall on Saturday to watch Leslee compete in a model show.

I was already planning on going there to do some shopping and jumped at being able to support Leslee (I had helper her a couple of weeks ago work on introducing herself in English in case she got invited to this competition).

She started out in this cute blue dress with a teddy bear clutched in her arms. She walked in and gave the judges a big smile and the traditional peace sign. Then she talked to the guy in Chinese for awhile, ran back stage...

Her family and friends were prepared with a couple of signs, it has her name in English and her Chinese name (Yo Tien Hwa)

...she came back out dressed ready to cheer. She was cute and did a dance to "Oh Mickey."

Her score! She was number 32 and the best that you could get was 30!

Afterwards Leslee and Alice (one of the 5 year olds) hugged, played, and ran around like little girls do.

Drum-roll please...out of 50 participants Leslee got 2nd place! So she along with these two others will be going to Taipei in two weeks to represent Hualien in a bigger competition.

They looked thrilled (or distracted at least :D) by their prizes.

I looked over to see Alice scrounging through my purse...naughty girl!

Our beautiful winner! (I'm not a proud teacher :D)

PhotoHunt: Covered

My freshman year I was a custodian at the Cannon Center. Every evening we had to wait until Tomassitos (a pizza place) and Cosmos (a hamburger grill) closed so that we could do their dishes. Because Tomassitos wasn't that big of a place they would fill those grey tubs up with ice and keep the food containers in the ice. Most nights we would melt it in the sink, but one night for some strange reason Matt agreed to let Cari dump the ice on him after work. So here he is covered with freezing cold ice water.

$10 Challenge

I stumbled upon a CNN article tonight for a $10 challenge, to see what you could buy. You can see the article here. I was really impressed with how far some people could make their money go. I think that it will be something that I will do when I get home, I really liked how some people were able to do their meals for a week on it...but one that I was really impressed with was this guy, how he was able to have a full days worth of adventures on so little money...

Going Virtual

I was having a strong desire to play hymns on the piano this evening and as I don't have a piano I thought that was going to be slightly difficult. Bus alas it is not as difficult as I thought, I simply googled "play piano online" and soon had a list of virtual piano websites. I tried a couple of them but this one is my favorite, you can do it with your mouse or they have even assigned certain keys to certain piano keys (it takes a little bit of playing but you get used to it). Besides piano they also have the organ, saxophone, flute, pan pipes, strings, guitar, steel drums, and double bass.

Looking for a fun way to play music? Check it out HERE

Bug Attack

Tuesday evening I was supposed to have tutoring at 7pm, it got to be 7:15 and I hadn't seen Jenny yet...I decided to go outside and see if she was hiding or something (because that's the sort of thing these kids do), I stood up from my desk and noticed 3 bugs flying in my room, I was annoyed to see them but didn't really think that much about them. I opened the door to outside and see at least 60 of the same bug flying around the light on our porch, I'm pretty sure that I screamed and slammed the door to our room at the same time.

Andrea (who was tutoring in the kitchen) turned around at my scream and her jaw dropped, the girls that she was tutoring freaked out! They started screaming and opened the door to the kitchen so even more flew in there.

Andrea and I went crazy with the fly swatters, pretty soon the floors and everywhere else was covered in wings, quite disgusting but we rather have the wings than the flying objects.

At one point I turned off the lights outside and they all rushed towards my window (the lights were on still inside), kind of funny but I wasn't excited to be in the way of the direction they were all flying.

I asked Teacher Stephanie about it on Wednesday, she said that they are flying ants and that when it has been warm and then starts raining they all come flying out and head towards the light. My Mom suggested that also because it is spring there is an abundance of them, all I know is that we were not happy to see them.

Our tutor students told us though that we should keep a bowl of water on the ground in the kitchen, the ants will think that it's light and fly to it, but will die because it's water---works for me!

Easter Surprises

Last week I was sitting on my bed reading something when Andrea walked into my room and said "Happy Easter" handing me this basket. She had surprised me and filled it with some of my favorite things...sprite, a cheese bagel from 7-Eleven, jelly beans, marshmallows...

...and these cute tiara/crown earrings, because my Mom always calls me Princess...

...and pink polka dot socks, because I LOVE pink, polka dots, and socks!

Andrea was so sweet to surprise me with this!

Easter Egg Hunt

Last week in honor of Easter we did an Easter egg hunt for the kids during one of our afternoon classes. While the kids watched Winnie the Pooh: Springtime with Roo, Andrea and Yuling hid the eggs outside.

When it was time Yuling came and explained the rules, if they brought in one egg they got one sucker, if they brought in two eggs at one time they got one suckers (the objective was to make it last as long as possible so we wanted them to bring them in one at a time).

The 3 year olds got to go first, for 30 seconds and then the 4 year olds joined them for 30 seconds and finally the 5 year olds were released (they were anxious to go, with their shoes already on by the time it was their turn).

The kids had a blast rushing to try and find eggs and then running like there was no tomorrow to get their suckers. When class was over there was still 3 that had not been found, so Yuling offered a bigger prize for the 3 lucky people that found them. Later when I came back downstairs, Wendy (who had found one of the 3) was so excited to show me her big candy cane that she had won!