Graduation!

It's hard to believe but the school year is over already. It seems like I just started and it definitely doesn't seem like a whole school year has gone by. I am definitely ready for a break and excited for the things I'm doing this summer but I will definitely miss my kids. We had graduation last week and it was a great time to celebrate our students.
Graduation is a huge huge deal here and along with graduation for the kindergarteners and grade 6, we also have awards for all of our students from each grade level. Each class comes up with awards that each one of the students has earned (gift of science, gift of friendliness, etc.). We recognize all of our students for their special gifts and have a ceremony before the graduation ceremony just for them. It is an awesome ceremony for the kids just to feel special and bring all the school together. After the recognition ceremony we had our grad ceremony for the kindergarteners and grade 6. It was a long but very awesome day and it was great celebrate with all of our kids and their families. I wasn't able to take pictures during graduation, but I was hoping someone who took pictures would post them so I could put them in here. If someone posts them I'll put them in a blog but for now I don't have any, sorry.
A couple weeks before school was out we had our family fun day on the beach out in front of the Jungle Barn. The whole school and their families were invited to come on a Saturday and enjoy games and lunch and a fun time together. Me and a couple other teachers took charge of organizing and planning the day and it was fun coming up with all the games to play. We split the school up into 4 different teams, red, yellow, blue, and green. We had several games and competitions for everyone, the kindies through grade 6 and even the parents. To start the day we had each team make a team name, design a poster, make a sandcastle, and come up with a team cheer.

team green dragons

Team red love

Team yellow king

Team blue whale

The next game we had was probably the funnest of the day. Four way tug of war. We started with the kindies and went up all the way to the moms and then the dads.

 There really aren't many things more fun than watching kindergarteners in a 4-way tug of war.

Grades 1-3 were up next.

 Then grades 4-6 started to bring out the muscles.

The parents got their turns next and those were also very exciting to watch. The fathers and the mothers wee both extremely competitive.

 We also had a three legged race with mother-daughter and father-son.

The mothers had a straw tower building contest. Each team got a pack of straws and had 5 minutes to build the tallest tower they could.

 Our last game was our amazing race. Each grade level had to do a different part of the race.

Halfway through a parent from each team had to swim out to get their team flag and bring it back to a student to run back to the finish.

 At the finish line the teams had to build a human pyramid.

 Blue was the first team finished, then green and yellow finished at the same time.

Last weekend after graduation we took a retreat to the other island. It was so nice to take a break and relax for a weekend after the end of the year being so stressful.  We took a trip to Antique which is about an hour and a half away on the other island. We stayed in a "resort" right on the river and it was so nice and peaceful. I got a much needed weekend of relaxation and rest. It was also nice just to take a step off the island for a little bit and get out to see some more things. It was so awesome being over there in a completely different world. Boracay is basically city life everywhere and is covered with tourists everywhere. Antique is farm and jungle. There were a lot of people that lived on the river and used farming as a way of survival. It was also surrounded by jungle everywhere there weren't fields. It was really what I was thinking Boracay would look like before I came to the Philippines. It was really nice to get away from the city and get to a place where things were slowed down and relaxed. During the day we hung out in the river with some of the local kids that wanted to swim with us. We also took a hike into the jungle to see some waterfalls. The hike in itself was awesome, trekking through the jungle and seeing so many cool things. We got to the falls and it's a 7 tier waterfall with the bottom three being possible to get to. You had to use a climbing rope and climb up the cliff to do it, but it was doable.

This was the first tier of the water fall, or the seventh if you start from the top I guess. There is a lot more water coming down in rainy season than there was now.

 This is the third tier fall. There were some rocks to the side to jump from.

 Our guide started climbing straight up the waterfall. He is an amazing rock climber because there was not much to grab or step on but he did it no problem. The water is also falling a lot harder than it looks, it's still a strong force when it is falling on you, plus the rock is super slippery. I was definitely extremely impressed.

A cool looking flower.

 A lot of rice terraces just in the middle of the jungle.

 Wild pineapple.

 Everything is made out of bamboo, even the bridges. It's not as sturdy as it looks, and it doesn't look very sturdy.

 A water buffalo taking a bath in the river.

 Another bamboo bridge.

 A cable bridge. It was actually a lot less sturdy than the bamboo bridges. We were jumping and shaking it back and forth, definitely pretty fun but not super smart.

Looking over the river from the bridge.
The weekend was so relaxing and was just what I needed. It was also so much fun to see another part of the Philippines and see people living in a completely different style of life. It was also amazing how cheap it was also. It costs us 50 cents to take the boat to the other island. In the Philippines our group of 15 only needs to take one 11 passenger van. The van cost us $3 each to go the hour and a half trip to Antique. The place we stayed cost $3.75 per person per night and we stayed 2 nights. Our guide to the falls cost us $5 split between 15 of us. It was definitely the best $16 vacation I've ever been on.
I got back to the island and had a few things to wrap up in school with grades and finishing everything up for the year. I also had to come up with the schedule for summer school. One of the Filipino teachers who is staying over summer and I are doing summer school, we had to come up with the scheduling and everything to set it up. It has been good the last couple days to be able to rest and take it easy for he most part. I still have plenty of things to do, but just have more time to do it now.
It has also been interesting being here over Holy Week. The Thursday and Friday before Easter are both holidays here and so everybody takes their vacation to Boracay this weekend. There are so many people here, it's crazy. I've just been staying in for the most part because everything is closed and it's hard to walk anywhere with so many people everywhere. Holidays are also hard times to be away from your family. It's always hard but it's magnified on holidays and when you have so many memories of everything you'd be doing at home it makes it hard. It's part of being here and it's what I signed up for but there are times when it's just tough. I love what I'm doing and I know I need to be here but that doesn't mean I wouldn't buy a teleportation device if it existed.
Thank you for your love, support, and prayer. I appreciate it so much. I hope you all have an amazing Easter and enjoy your time with your family and take advantage of the time you have together, don't take it for granted. Enjoy it for me.

Time Flies!

I apologize that it's been a couple weeks since my last post. It has been an extremely busy couple of weeks. We had our graduation and last day of school set on March 27th and so we had a lot of things to do and get done for the end of the year. And then last week the Philippine Deped decided to make the decision that all graduations had to be before March 23rd so that it wasn't interfering with Easter week. So we now had 2 weeks to do 3 weeks of stuff. So we had to change up our entire schedule for testing and everything else to move up the end of the school year to the 22nd. It has been an extremely busy and stressful couple of weeks, but I can see the light t the end of the tunnel. We only have one more week of school, which is just so hard to believe. It seems like I just started and yet I'm already a week away from being done with my first year of teaching here.
I love teaching here, and I love my kids, and am going to miss them a lot, but I am definitely ready for a change of schedule. I am very excited for the summer and the different things that it offers me. I am excited to have a couple days to be able to just sit and relax. I love all the things that I have been able to recently and like that I don't have to search for things to do, but there has been so much stuff on my agenda for the last month and a half and then having to add even more at the end of the year as we changed our schedule has just worn me out. I am excited to just be able to relax and think for a couple days. I am also excited though for all the things I will be doing over the summer. I will be doing some traveling in the Philippines and am really excited to see more of the country and just to have some time off the island and the chance to do some fun things. In April I'm going to be going with one of the missionary families and another missionary to Donsol to swim with whale sharks. I am extremely excited for that, it'll probably be the craziest thing I do while I'm over here. We are also going to be doing a lot of hiking and exploring the land while we are there for a couple days. Boracay is beautiful, but there really isn't much to do here and not a whole lot to explore. It's going to be a really nice vacation break.
When I get back from that I'll have about a month of summer school. I will be one of only three missionaries here then and I was the only one who volunteered to do summer school. There is only one Filipino teacher who is going to be working over summer too as of right now, so I was a little disappointed in that because with only two of us it's going to be a lot busier than I was really expecting. That will definitely keep me busy over that month. I will also be running my Cagban feeding site still as well as picking up the Salvador feeding site on Wednesdays for the summer.
In May I'll be going with the other two missionaries to one of our Filipino teacher's hometown for a week. They have a big festival every year that we'll get to see as well as exploring the things around the area. We are really excited about being able to go do that and see some more of the Philippines and experience much more Filipino culture.
We'll get back from that at the end of May and have a couple weeks before school starts up again. It'll be a busy summer, but it will be full of a lot of fun and new things and I think will really refresh me and get me ready for another year of teaching. I still have a week to go but the excitement of summer is pulling me to the finish line. This next week we have our final exams and then we go into graduation rehearsal and then graduation on Friday. We're still scrambling to get everything done and ready, but we're going to make it through.
Recently I have been spending a large amount of my time working on our textbooks for next years. Some of us volunteered to put together the English textbooks for next year so that we could both save a lot of money as well as have a better quality textbook that suits us better. Two of the missionaries took up the first and second grade books. The sixth grade teacher took up the 6th grade book, and the 3rd/4th grade teacher and I took up the 3rd, 4th, and 5th grade books. She focused on the 3rd grade book, I focused on the 5th grade book, and we both worked on the 4th grade book. We needed to finish them by the end of the school year so that they could be reviewed by our principal and sent off to make the books. We are putting the finishing touches on them right now and it is definitely a huge weight off of our shoulders having those almost finished. It was such an extremely large amount of work and I'm really glad I did it but it was so exhausting. I think probably the most awesome part of it though is that it has given me even more experience and knowledge. I learned a lot from putting those books together and it will definitely make me a better English teacher. I am also really excited to have those books next year instead of the books we had this year. There is so much more in these books and we were able to make them to fit how we want to teach them. I worked on the 4th and 5th grade books since that is what I am planning on teaching next year.
I have also been working on a MAPEH book for next year. MAPEH stands for music, art, physical ed, and health. It is a required subject here in the Philippines but just from what I've seen here it doesn't really get taught much. I have never seen a Filipino teacher teach any PE and even music and health I don't think gets much attention at all. I am obviously very passionate about PE and so that was the biggest reason I wanted to put this book together. It is crazy to me that these kids only get PE once a week when they see me during club time. I can understand a lot of the reasons why the teachers might not want to do PE and so I'm hoping to be able to put together a book with a lot of simple, quick, and easy ways to have physical activity in the class. I am really trying to stress how important it is, and also how simple it could be to do some things. I have started putting it together recently as we were finishing up our English books and when school is finished up I'll be able to have more time to work on it. I am really excited about it and I really hope that the teacher can learn from it and will use some of it.
I'm sorry it took me so long to get this blog out and I'm sorry I don't have more for you. I'll be able to post more once I have a little more time. I thank you for your continued support of me and of what I am doing here. Your support makes a huge impact in a lot of peoples' lives, including mine.