Back to school

Well, term 3 has started with a bang. Conn is teaching the class here that I used to teach, and I travel to Betio with Laae and teach the juniors there. We got the scheme for the term last Thursday and spent our weekend planning and preparing for the first week. It went rather well. Seemed like the kids enjoyed our lessons and were learning. We worked on setting up incentives for the kids (those who come to class on time, bring their exercise books, library books, and those who come to the library on the scheduled days), what activities we'll do this term and how we'll assess the students and report to the parents. This week we worked on the 'b' and 'p' sounds (which are practically the same and children here, and adults, have trouble with); nouns; learned a good morning song; read stories and wrote summaries; and wrote about what the children did during the term break. We'll continue with these skills and build on them for next week. We're looking forward to doing puppet shows, songs, skits, reading sight words and key words from our readings, math word problems, and writing sentences leading into paragraphs. (I feel like I'm writing a beginning of the school year letter to parents!) I usually take the bus to Betio, which is an hour long ride, so I get daily reflecting time. The boys stay here with Conn so they get time to play with their friends before class. We found that Parker really likes a couple of marbles he found so we've incorporated them into his therapy to get him to turn his hand over and reach up and out to pass them back and forth with us. He also likes stickers and has made several sticker pictures with them.
Healthwise, we are getting better with only minimal setbacks. Parker's diarrhea seems to be getting better, but he threw up in the night this week, and Tanielu threw up six times yesterday morning. We did go back to the American doctors for a follow up. Since Tanielu was still wheezing some and we had been giving albuterol every 4 hours, he got some steroids to help out. They really did and he's doing much better. His antibiotic worked wonders and almost all his sores are healed. We also got a couple more bottles of children's multi-vitamins. The kids make sure they take them every day, even Parker asks for them. We're hoping and praying that we keep getting better and that this is making us stronger for the rest of our stay. We're taking it term by term, so we're aiming for December. It's hard to justify staying in a place so dirty and contaminated when your kids are so sick... but who wants to travel with vomit and diarrhea? We're instilling the importance of keeping their hands out of their faces and washing themselves with soap twice daily.
Hope all is well Stateside and everyone enjoys your Labor Day weekend. Have a hot dog for us!