Flooded Classroom

Today my classroom flooded and that was crazy! The heaters here are run by hot water pumping through them and today they were draining the old water out in preparation of turning the heaters on in a few weeks. Problem was, something went wrong so all the yucky old water drained into my classroom instead of where ever else it was supposed to go. Before the water started gushing out of the small pipe air was whistling and spurting out and it was so loud  my kids were terrified and started running out of the classroom. The the brown nasty water started gushing. Ewwww. It was too bad it flooded but then we got to have class outside and the kids just ran around and had fun. It was fun to watch them be kids and be goofy because the school is very strict so they don't have a lot of running around play time outside. I got super wet with some pretty nasty water while I was trying to direct it into  trashcan rather than the floor and my shoes got soaked but thankfully the Chinese teachers mopped the classrooms while we were outside.

Jello!

Today in class we made jello. It was awesome because I would mix water with red crystal light, then put it in a cardboard box “fridge” then take out an identical container of real jello. Then I’d carefully hold it and walk up to one of the kids then suddenly “splash” it on their faces, but of course it was jello so it didn’t go anywhere! They would just look at me in shock then slowly lift up their hands to feel their face and then be even more in shock when nothing was there. That sounds horribly mean but it was seriously the funniest thing ever and they were so enthralled. Before I had the idea of "splashing" them I would just tip it upside down suddenly and watch their jaws drop when nothing spilled. Jello is not a common thing here in China!

Halloween Horror

It’s almost Halloween so here’s a horror story. 

Today my lesson was making sandwiches out of moldy bread, but they obviously didn’t eat them. I would make a sandwich and put leaves and clean tissues and toothpicks onto the bread to make a yucky sandwich. It was a lot of fun to see the kids reactions and about half the lesson was on not eating yucky food, especially not moldy bread. It was a good lesson and in my last class they pretended to eat the bread, then reenacted puking and dying and stuff like that so I thought the message was pretty clear “you don’t eat moldy bread". (It was literally covered in green mold because I forgot about it for three weeks.) At the end of my last class they weren’t listening so I had them help clean the classroom and they threw away all the fake food and the sealed bag of moldy bread and tissues. I thought the lesson had gone well and I only had a few minutes left in class when I heard kids yelling “TEACHA!! TEACHA!!” and I turned around and Romeo the king of pills was standing over the trashcan with the bread bag ripped open and a huge mouthful of bread. EWWWW!! Why WHY would you do that??? I freaked out and had him spit it in the trash can and tried to get him to spit it all out and I think he got most of it out but another little girl named Chris also ate a little of it and I don’t know if she swallowed but I told her to spit it out, too. I was terrified thta the kids would get sick and I would get in trouble and the Romeo kept saying “Teacha, me no bleh (pretending to throw up) me no yucky” but I wanted him to know it was not ok that he did that so I pointed at him and motioned that he was going to throw up. In the end, both kids came to class the next day perfectly fine so I guess they're ok! That was definitely a scary teaching moment, though!