Day Three at School

Jocelyn Writes:
Our internet access has been down the last couple of days so I am in the process of putting up descriptions of the kids first couple of days of school (scroll down for the First Day....). The walk to school takes about 20 minutes but we are able to take a cab if we run late. We see so many interesting things as we walk ... I am including pictures of some of them. Though the first day was tough on everyone, the kids seem to be adjusting to school. Everyone is at school from 8:00 AM-12:00 PM. We are not sure how much they are able to learn in their Chinese classrooms but they certainly have been warmly welcomed. We are hoping that after a time, they will start to pick up some Chinese!

Ayden Writes:

Exercises in China

At the school that I go to they do a lot of exercises. Let me tell you what I am talking about. In the morning we do something called morning exercises. Also in the later morning we do eye exercises. Both of them are pretty odd. During PE we do something like morning exercises.

I’m going to tell you about morning exercises. Morning exercises take place every morning at about 9:10. The whole school comes outside for morning exercises. They take about 5 minutes to get in to perfect lines. Then a guy comes up on to a big stage in front of us and leads the morning exercises. To me morning exercises make me feel like I am in the army because you have to keep your body straight and you call out words in Chinese loudly.

We also do eye exercises. Eye exercises are a quiet time to massage your eyes. It takes place after break at about 11:00 AM. The whole school does it. They put on a Chinese tape with music and words on the loud speaker. This is what you do during eye exercises: you take you hands and you put them on your face and move them around your face to relax your eyes. It looks weird. It is very hard for me to do because I cant always get my hands in the right position.

--Ayden

Gavi Writes:

Hi everyone,

Today was my third day of school. The day started the same as the last two. I walked into the classroom, everyone stared; then I walked to my seat, everyone stared; I sat down, everyone stared; I got my stuff out, and everyone stared. The first class I had was math. Math is becoming one of my favorite activities here because unlike most else its familiar and exactly the same as it is in Boston. Well, besides the fact that the teacher teaches in Chinese… After math was Chinese class. I never understand any of this because it’s in Chinese, about Chinese, and I’m really not very good at Chinese. Next we went outside and ran around the basketball courts twice completely synchronized. Well, everyone else was completely synchronized, I, on the other hand, could not seem to get my feet to line up with theirs.

After this we went inside and had a ten-minuet break. When I got inside I sat down in my seat and the girl who sits next to me, Yue Lei, sat down in her seat. I asked her to please write down her name for me in pin yin so that I could be sure I was pronouncing it right and the next thing I knew the entire class was around my desk scrambling to be the next to write their name in my notebook. It became very crowded around our desk. Then all of a sudden one girl who was standing behind me reached around my neck and started feeling my face. Then another couple of girls started playing with my hair. Then another kid grabbed my hand and started looking at it. All this time they were all talking in very fast Chinese that I could not at all comprehend. Luckily for me that’s when the teacher came in and everyone rushed to their seats. But, for the rest of the day I was passed sticky notes with names on them.

After Chinese we had Health. I found this very amusing. I had no idea what the teacher was saying but the reaction of the class was all too familiar. Then we had English. I have a feeling I’m doing pretty good in that class. Today we learned about how to ask someone what their nationality is and how to respond. We also learned the names of a few countries such as Russia, India, The United Kingdom, and Australia.

After school my siblings, my mom and I took a taxi back to the high school campus where we all ate lunch and Jenna kicked my butt in a game of basketball. Then we had a class on spoon painting. Mine has a face of some sort of dragon on the bowl and an interesting design on the handle. After the cultural class the high schoolers and I had a Language arts class with Mr. Mallory. Tonight we are planning to go out for hot pot for dinner. Hot pot is when everyone has their own pot of boiling water and you put different vegetables and/or meat in it. In fact I am being summoned now to get ready to leave.
More later,
Gavi