My First Week at School

My first week at school went very well. I worked on comparison words with the third graders, such as too, also, more, less, ect. And I worked on pronouns with the fourth graders.
The best part of the week with the third graders was on friday when I read to them from an American children's book about dogs. I found the book on the shelves at our house and it had many words comparign the dogs. I think a good portion of the class were able to follow the book, and most of them had never seen a brightly colored children's book before, so they all loved it, and begged me to bring it back on Monday.
The fourth graders are a bit more challengining to work with, but I think they are ready to start adding possesive pronouns into the mix next week.
Reccess with the kids has been a very interesting experience. There is a big open field of dust and mud and rocks with no play equipment, where all 700 kids have reccess at the same time. There is no adult superivision, and the other teachers think I am absaloutly crazy for going to play with the kids at recess. I finally figured out a game that could be played that both broke the language barrier and didnt require any balls. I picked up a rock and had the kids around me guess which hand it was in. Then they all picked up rocks and played it with each other! It was very cute, I dont think they had seen that game before. I saw a lot of rope in the back of the lot, I might try next week to see if it will work as jump ropes. Another interesting part of recess is watching how fast the kids run. The girls have on skirts and are barefoot and they run across the field of rocks like lightening!
The kids always copy everything I write on the board into their excercise books, but appearently the teachers do not usually ever look at what the kids write. I went around at the end of class one day and wrote with a pink pen "good job" by all of their writing, and they loved it. They begged me to do it the next day, but its impossible to do everyday with more than 60 kids in a class, so I need to figure out a way to check their work without mass chaos. Although everything is mass chaos when you have six kids sitting a bench made for three kids!
One of the funniest parts of teaching is that the kids pronounce teacher, teachaah, with a sort of british accent, it makes me smile every time they say it!