Wow. Week four of school has started, which means I've been in the country for six weeks?! Amazing how time flies, especially when you are a bit more familiar with things. For all of you keeping count of my number of students, I have nine now. All of whom are girls! On the first day of school we had a family with two children show up and practically on the spot decide to enroll their children. One of which is now in my class. So, day two of school my class size grew by about 12 percent. Praise the Lord!

I have been praying for 80 students since spring of last year even though the school goal is for at least 50. I thought, "Why not go big and pray boldly?" These two students are an answer to those prayers. We are now at 27 students for the school and have a ways to go, but the Lord will provide. The comical part of this whole thing is that so far all the inquiries for the school have been for first grade, i.e., my class. I had the thought one day that "I was silly enough to pray for 80 students and God is going to put them all in my class!" Thankfully I have a maximum of 15. But, the thought gave all the staff a good chuckle.

Just so everyone can be a little more clear about my classroom dynamics; here is a break down of my class. I have 9 girls. 6 first graders and 3 second graders. 2 are new to the school. I taught the 3 second graders last year in first grade. I have 2 native English speakers. 2 German speakers. 3 Swiss German speakers. 4 Spanish speakers. 1 Chinese speaker. and 1 Polish speaker. All but 1 of these students understands and speaks English at some level. Now, if you are keeping count, you might be confused by the math...four of my students speak 2 languages fluently.

You can probably guess where most of my students might come from, but their nationalities get even more interesting. They are Lebanese-American, German-American, Colombian-Cameroonian, Spanish, Chinese, Spanish, Swiss-Polish, Swiss, and Swiss-Colombian. It gets even more complicated when you start figuring out where everyone was born and where they have lived. Needless to say that on top of teaching two grades to nine 6 and 7 year old students who are used to one-on-one attention and the realization that flipping between English, Spanish, and German (yes, this is true because of my student who does not know English. I spend quite a bit of time pulling out the rusty Spanish vocabulary) is incredibly taxing when done for eight hours straight, I got a little overwhelmed by the dynamics of my class:)

But, I love that this is my school and these are my kids. There are not many other places in the world where this would be the make up of my class. I am outnumbered in every way when it comes to language and world (traveling/living) experience. Yet, these kids, like any other, just want to learn and be loved. Which I can and am more than willing to accommodate!

Anyway, I just thought I would let you know that I have really cool kids and I love, love, love my job!


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