I'm learning so much!

Yesterday is an easy recap, it was a nice day.  In the morning I was in standard 4 and I could not believe the learning that I was observing! There are upwards of 30 students in almost every classroom with three or four teachers.  The teachers have a specialty, but they could teach all of the subjects  Since they teach their specialty, they support the teacher teaching the lesson and work with a small group of students. Ms. Sandra, one of the standard 4 teachers was writing words up on the board, which eventually we found out is a poem called a cinquain.  I had no idea what this poem was so I was basically learning with the students! As she was teaching this, the students had nothing on their desks, they just listened, watched, and retained everything.  They did a few examples as a class and then the students began to make their own.  For those of you who may not know what a cinquain is/looks like, I am happy to provide one:

India (noun)

Loud, dirty (2 adjectives)

Honking, begging, celebrating (3 present tense verbs)

Home for the next two months, (phrase)

Culture (noun that is a synonym for the first noun).

I was certainly amazed by this and was happy to learn about poetry, although I wonder why I never learned it in school.  Perhaps I just don't remember.  After being in standard 4 for the morning, I spoke with Rekha about teaching and planning to determine what exactly it will look like for me in the next few weeks.  So, we sat down and planned everything which was great.  Looks like I'll be teaching one unit per week in a given standard and I'll be starting with math in standard 4 next week! Rekha has invited me to spend Diwali (pronounced Divali because I don't think they can pronounce the "w") at her house tomorrow through Sunday morning so I'm very excited for that!  For Diwali, they make these things called Diyas, which I will explain more later, but I made two of these with standard 3 in the afternoon. Everyone at school is great!  I think that is pretty much it for yesterday, as I said, nothing terribly significant.

They learned about the circulatory system and then they eat made their own system.

Standard 4 classroom- they take off their shoes to learn!