"Move forward, and stop"

Recently I have been realizing that it sometimes seems my 10 year old students work harder than I do. Their typical schedule begins by waking up at 6:00am, classes from 8:00-12:00, followed by more classes from 2:00-4:30, and then sometimes they have evening classes. I have been a little under the weather this week and have been going to bed really early. I will be lying in bed and hear students outside my window “attention, move forward, and stop, 1-2.” This is a regular chant they say as they are walking in a line from one place to another. I look over at the clock and it’s almost 9:00pm. They continue this draining pattern 5 days a week...I’m exhausted just thinking about all the studying and work they do!
We have been studying an exciting topic…food. This week we learned words like chef, soup, carrots, celery, onion, mix up, cut up, serve, restaurant, and menu. I was able to show a cooking scene from the Disney movie “Ratatouille.” It fit all of the vocabulary so well and my students loved it! I love when students are learning but they don’t even realize it! My Chinese co-teacher that also teaches my students English is having some of the higher-level students act out a scene the story “Ali Baba” that they are reading in her class. She asked if they could use my apartment to film the scene, so today I had eight of my little 4th graders in turbans and middle-eastern costumes in my apartment. It was quite adorable and entertaining!
This week we will be another busy week of teaching and we are preparing a Thanksgiving dinner for all of our co-teachers on Friday. We have ordered the turkey and will be doing our best to create all of the traditional side dishes with the ingredients we can find. We hope to have a recipe station, share the history of the holiday, and share things we are thankful for as we take the opportunity to serve our teachers, share some American traditions, and The reason we are thankful!