Open House

Wednesday was Open House. It was quite a stressful event as we just returned from a month vacation and have only been in school for 8 days. Those 8 days were a mad rush of activities to "pretty" up the room with educationally driven art and written work. It was quite exhausting.

Open House always falls on a Wednesday. We always have minimum days on Wedsnesdays. The kids left at 1:00 and I had until 6:00 for Open House to start. My room was in such disarray from our 8 days or craziness that I had a BIG mess to clean up. I plugged away at it and did the best I could with it. Luckily, I brought my new Alejandro Fernandez live in Spain DVD with me to school so El Potrillo kept me company!!!

By 4:00 I had made a huge dent in the mess. Things had shaped up quite well BUT I still had stacks of paperwork and books to put away and file. I was too tired at this point to do anything more. Just then, I saw a large tub tucked away under a table. BINGO!

I shoved everything in the tub and that was it. I took off to buy treats for the families and my customary bouquet of yellow-tipped, maroon Chrysanthemums. So pretty!

The families poured in at 6:00. While I only had 11 kids represented that night out of my 20, I had a BUNCH of family members that came to visit. My students brought both parents as well as their siblings and tios. It was great. At one point I had about 25-30 people in the room at one time. Each family stayed a minimum of 20 minutes or so.

The kids were busy taking their families on classroom tours of our room, playing educational games with them or explaining plant life cycles and anatomy to them.

One of my students, Jo, was so completely thrilled to have both his mom and dad in his room. He was grinning from ear to ear the entire time they were there. He took his class tour seriously checking off each item as he went down the list. It was so beautiful to see him so engaged and proud and his parents so lovingly proud and supportive of him. It was an amazing sight to witness. It made me feel proud too!

An interesting thing about this Open House was that I saw more whole family units come to this event than I have in the past. Usually we mainly see moms. It is nice to have dads come along too. The teacher next door said that the dad of one of his students came by. He doesn't come by too often. He walked in and couldn't stop commenting on how beautiful the room looked and that in Mexico they never had anything like this. He then went over to a chair and sat down and just took everything in. My neighbor said that the man was in awe of our American classrooms and was overwhelmed! :-)

I was not happy that Open House came so early this year. I have to say though that it was quite a successful event and I am glad to be done with that for the rest of the year!