Best Things In Life Are Free

• We met the kids and families today! It was fun to see them in person and show them the classroom. A few of the kids will be a lot of work (in addition to the extra challenge of them not speaking English) but I’m excited to be with them. I was able to redirect two very active boys (who were head-butting each other, with their parents looking on, taking photos) into the block area, to build houses for their dinosaurs. Four other children joined and we were all building and naming animals for quite a while. It was so fun and reminded me of what I’m here to do…help the kids, teachers, and parents accept play-based education.
• Today, my principal asked if I would be interested in helping educate other teachers about being more environmentally friendly! She said she knew I was passionate about that (maybe I mentioned that in my interview?) and knew that I’d have some good ideas, since I’m fresh to China from the US (unlike her, who has lived in Beijing for 14 years). Of course, I said yes! (My Towsley peeps will be proud that I’ll be guilting a new group of teachers into recycling ;)) She even said I could lead a PD…woo! Yay for trying new things and giving people ideas on how to more green :)
• After all the PD today, we had a staff social at school. This is the third one in the past two weeks but they are actually pretty fun, especially since I haven't gotten to see many non-ECC staff over the past few days (and probably won't see much of them as school gets started :/). Plus, the food has been pretty good AND they serve alcohol! In the school cafeteria! ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

• Nate and I went to Shine City (a big mall/outlet area close by) to explore a little and found a dollar-type store that Ali told us about. She called it "Dollar IKEA" and it totally was! All the colors of everything matched and was very modern and was all super affordable. Nate had to stop me from buying everything. BUT, best of all, they had free ice cream! It was blue moon-ish but it was FREE! ¯\_(ツ)_/¯