The Most Amazing Thing

The best part of my year happened this week:
I was sitting in my classroom in the half hour before class starts and usually, I teach ESL (which is for kids who are struggling in the classroom.) But on Friday, I didn't have to teach it and so I was sitting at my desk doing work. When I left the classroom, Por's mom asked me if I had a second because she wanted to show me something. (Usually when she says that, she'll run to her car and grab some fruit for me, or some pictures of Christmas program, or something....) But this time she pulls out her camera and turns it on. I kinda stood there confused for a bit, because it just looked like a picture of Por looking at a book. But then she told me to listen and she held her camera up to my ear, and he was reading it!
The best part is not that Por can read, because I know that already. He reads books for me in tutoring every now and then, and he sounds out words in class all the time. But the exciting part was that he had enough confidence to read a book for his MOM!!! And she was absolutely THRILLED!! It was SO cool to see her SO excited that she waited at my classroom door for me to be done teaching. It completely made my day and quite possibly my year.

The other cool thing that happened this week was Overnight Camp. The kids tented in the playground on Friday night, and stayed for most of the day on Saturday. It's always interesting when you have 90 kids camping in the playground - for instance: everyone had a hard time falling asleep, and it took until 1:30 to get them all in their tents. (for some reason, they don't understand that if you keep your tent CLOSED, there won't be mosquitos inside!) Another: at 2:00am, one of the kids puked in his tent, and Colleen had to clean it up, so when I came outside for my supervision shift at 2:30, all the kids were walking around again, and the teachers were moving tents and rinsing things off... (ah, the joys of pizza parties and pillow fights before bed.)
The cool part though, was just seeing the kids in another atmosphere. We do our best to make overnight camp feel like SummerCamp, and it's really neat to see everyone being that transparent. It's interesting to see how they react to no sleep, and encouraging to see the staff all pull together and work hard to make it work. Colleen and I led a group of grade 5 boys, and it was awesome to spend time with them and other kids and get to know them better. Erin and Deona and I had a crazy time leading a "Fun with Baking" activity center. (hmmm - we only have 30 minutes, a limited budget and one oven. HOW will this be fun??) But we ended up making cookies and having contests, and I had fun. (don't know about them) We ended, once again, with a water fight and ice cream, which was great! And so, despite the 4 hours of sleep I had, it was a really fun weekend.
And although I was sick for the first 5 days, it was a really good week! I hope yours was equally as good!