Tutoring has been going smoothly.  I've had the seventh graders practicing conversations in small groups about controversial things like whether or not the students should have to wear uniforms to school or if they should be allowed to chew gum in class.  I hope I don't create a mutiny for Maggie to come back to.  They write down their reasons in conversational form and then practice in front of the class.  Some of them have gotten very creative with it which has been encouraging but now they are asking for to mix it up.  After editing their written conversations I chose a few particularly troubling sentences and wrote them on the board today.  I asked if they could identify any of the problems and discussed with them why certain things needed to be fixed.  They appeared to be retaining some of what I said.  Tomorrow I will use what one of the school supervisors gave me which is a list of the proper pronunciations of english prefixes.  Obviously I know how to pronounce these words but it has been so automatic for so long that I really did not know how to explain it to these kids.  This will be a big help and will hopefully make understanding what these kids are saying much easier.

Yesterday we began to organize the after school activities.  Though organization was the goal it is still a work in progress, unfortunately.  The kids are all signed up to play two sports each which include soccer, basketball, volleyball, track, and badminton.  We may start a frisbee league as well as the kids already love to play and a few sports are over ridden.  Currently we have over sixty girls who want to play badminton and we only have four or five rackets.  Pretty much everyone loves soccer so that sport has been flooded and gets disorganized quickly.  The two extracurricular fellows would be overwhelmed if they had to run everything by themselves so the rest of us are glad to help.  I originally wanted to be an extracurricular fellow anyway and now I get a tiny bit more exercise out of it.

On Monday we celebrated one of the quieter kid's birthdays.  We bought him a remote control car, which I suspect won't survive long unfortunately, but he seems to be enjoying it a lot.  As soon has he opened his gift he was gone, leaving all of the other kids to finish the left over cake.  Everyone had a blast and it turned out to be a great night.

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