Goodbye to my Canadian Housemates

It's been a busy week. On Thursday, Melissa and Dusty left Park Avenue for the last time. They arrived in September 2008 on the Holidaymaker's visa, which entitled them to live here for 2 years, but only work for 12 months of that. I'm on the Youth Mobility visa (applicants up to 30 years old may apply) which replaced the Holidaymaker's visa) and I'm allowed to live and work here for two years. So we had a farewell dinner at a local restaurant early in the week, and then I said goodbye to them on Thursday morning. They took 7 massive suitcases/hockey bags to the airport with them. I'm missing them already. I am finally starting to get to know my Swedish housemates a bit. The two teens (Sona and Dennis) have been working really hard on correspondence studies to complete their high school education and get ready for university this fall, so I had barely seen a trace of them the first week they were here. Maria quit the job she had taken on mid-week, she got thrown into a nightmare class without any warning or support. She is now much happier on day-to-day supply work. Two of my friends from teacher's college arrived in London this week, so I'm hoping to get together with them soon.

School continues busy. We had our first "Big Write" on Friday. The kids got between 20 (yr 1) and 40 (yr 3 and up) minutes to write about the best day of their life. This coming week the theme is the worst day of your life. There's been lots of insets and information going around about that to get everyone on board. We're playing games each morning that target four things: Vocabulary (WOW words), Connectives (but, and, if, etc), Openers (how to begin a sentence), and Punctuation, known by the acronym VCOP. To make this a special time, the school has gone to a lot of effort to get folders for each child to store their Big Writes, special pens and paper that only get used for Big Write, and candles (fake for the younger kids) for the desks. Before recess we play a bunch of quick VCOP games, and then give the kids time to compose their thoughts on graphic organizers, and then after playtime, they come in and we play quiet classical music during the silent writing time.

David ( a friend from the Mennonite church) and I had dinner at an Italian restaurant near Leicester (pronounced Lester) Square last night and then went to see a show called The Misanthrope. It was played in the Comedy Theatre, but it had more of a postmodern cynicism to it...interesting anyway. It had the rhythms and rhymes of Shakespeare in contemporary prose with a modern theme. It was my first experience of standing to watch a show--we got the last two tickets available in the house. The theatre was very tall--we were standing on the third balcony, and looked to have been built in Victorian times. Leicester Square is an amazing part of London. There is theatre upon theatre upon comedy club upon theatre upon more comedy clubs for several blocks.