Eaten with a Fox or in a Box?

God bless teachers, especially of little ones.  I've learned that keeping track of these kids is like trying to herd cats, although I guess in this country it would be like trying to herd meerkats.  They have the attention span of a gnat, which drives me crazy sometimes but then I have to remember that they are four, not forty.  Mid-mornings are spent corraling the pre-K and kindergartners since they either aren't in school at all or are in school only half-day.  So Kate and I usually go down to the cottages around 10:30 and spend the mornings with the youngest ones in the village while the older ones are in school.   

I basically get the good end of the deal when it comes to spending time with the kids.   I get to play games with them, read books to them, find bugs, and then send them home at the end of the day.  Like in this picture above, Kilonzi and I were practicing a hand-clap game I had taught many of them.  Kilonzi is just about the cutest kid ever (although I guess we say that about every kid we meet) and is missing his two front teeth.  Some of the girls are obsessed with this hand-clap game and now want to play it every time they see me.  They start forming a line and then shove each other out of the way to get to me first.  It's cute, but then after awhile I just have to tell them we are done clapping hands!

Then sometimes we go looking for bugs.  I think we were rather fascinated by some weird looking green spider in this photo.  We constantly have to tell the kids, "Look, but don't touch."  They are always trying to get their hands all over everything - cameras, books, our clothes, my hair, and for some reason they are fascinated by my long nails - so we have to tell them just to look at things.  Well that phrase was short-lived, especially when it came to bugs.  They always want to flick or move them or crush them, then Michael just proceeded to squash the spider all together.  That was the end of looking at the spider.


So we moved on and attempted to spend some time reading.  Again, it's like herding cats.  We're encouraged to read to them out loud so that they can hear a native-English speaker and know better how to pronounce things but also how to add inflection in the appropriate places.  No 4-year old cares about that, as evidenced by the fact that they spend their story time sitting in a tire and are generally fascinated by what everyone else is doing rather than whether green eggs and ham should be eaten with a fox or be eaten in a box.

  
But then there are, of course, moments when I do have their attention even though they have no idea what they are doing or why they are doing it.  They are just excited to learn something new.  I don't think I need to explain the photo further.  :)

O-H!