Time flies when you get into a routine

I have no idea how this has happened, but it's come to my attention that it's been almost a month since my last blog entry. I'm quickly falling into a routine of teaching, lesson planning, and hanging out that, quite frankly, isn't very interesting. The teaching is far from easy, especially with the young kids (if anyone has any tips for taming 6 5-year olds who are crazy and don't speak the same language, I am all ears...) but still, it's crazy to think about how nervous I got during our training period before teaching for only 45 minutes to adults. Now, I almost daily teach for twice that long, with no stress.

There's been a few highlights of teaching, especially for Halloween last week. Although Halloween is not traditionally celebrated in Russia, we were encouraged to celebrate it, especially in our kids classes. We did crosswords, pictionary, and the 5-year olds even made masks and trick or treated to out recptionist! The best part was when she tried to give candy to them all and one boy said (in Russian) "my mom doesn't let me have candy" and refused to take it. 

Here's a picture of my classroom on Halloween:

Besides English, I've been learning other things too. For instance, have you ever heard of chess boxing? I hadn't. It is one round chess and one round boxing, alternating. Here's a page from one of my text books:

Finally, in most classes there are the teacher's pets. This can be amusing, however, when the kid's grasp on English is still fuzzy. Here's an example after our lesson today on past irregular verbs: 

So, either I'm dead or I'm now a bad teacher. Either way. At least he used the right verb. 

Hopefully it will not be another month before I post again, but my apologies if it is. I promise I'm still here, I've just found a routine.