:)

Haitians are legit- I wish I could do this...

My teaching techniques may not be ideal all the time but I would like to share with you some that have worked extremely lately. We have problems focusing... lets just say often. One of Henley's wonderful habits is to play with his pencil like its a plane and he drops it about 10 times each hour while playing with it. I'm not exaggerating when I say we got to the point where he spend 10% of his school day laying on his chair looking for his pencil. I told him I didn't care if he dropped his pencil on accident but the playing needed to stop because it wastes too much time. This worked for an hour, then back to playing. As it has been an ongoing problem, I got to the point where I jokingly told him that if he dropped his pencil one more time because he was playing with it I would tie it to his wrist all the way until lunch time, and he would even have to go downstairs and eat with it tied to him. Not more than a minute later he dropped it... so I found a shoestring and tied it to his wrist. He got made fun of by his brothers... peer pressure has power. And guess what... that was last Tuesday and he hasn't dropped his pencil more than twice since then. He though it was funny, so we took pictures- I still can't believe it actually worked :)

And Trey, the poor kid has an attention span of 10 seconds. If I can't keep him interested we are doomed. So I decided to make him teacher on Tuesday because he would not listen to what I was telling him to do. And guess what? It was the most productive day with Trey that I've had yet. He had to read me the directions and then I said and wrote the answer, every time making common mistakes that he usually would make and he always corrected me perfectly! When he taught me how to read, I said every word he wouldn't know wrong on purpose and he helped me sound them out. Making him sound out a word that he thinks he can't read is like pulling teeth, but for some reason it was more fun when i "didn't know" how to. This is him telling me to focus when I started to play with my pencil... haha :)

And Mr. Carmelo is a punk- loves to pretend like he doesn't know anything and see if he can get me to make his school easier. So I had a pop-wow with Licia (his mom) to figure out what he should/shouldn't know and I make him do push-ups if he tells me he doesn't know how to do something that he does. And we've already made progress- amazing how much progress you can make with a threat of 5 push-ups!

I'm having a blast figuring out the whole teacher thing and getting to know these 3 kids so well- they're awesome!

Somehow last week flew by even though I had pink eye which gave me constant headaches- . ALL day Saturday (and I mean since 8 in the morning until 6pm I worked on my midterm that was due. That was fun! (sarcasm) But since Nickenson is somewhat high maintenance, and I refuse to do schoolwork without a kid in my lap, it gave me the opportunity to spend the whole day with a little girl named Love Babie. Yes you read that right... her twin sister's name is Babie Love. Oh Haiti... anyways. She's malnourished and her skin looks like a dinosaur's skin, and she has a cough that makes her puke when she eats, but other than that shes the happiest kid ever: (not in this pic... but its the only one i took)

So after I finished I went to eat dinner, and remembered I had missed the weekly weigh-ins I usually help Licia with for the kids on the Medika Mamba program.... too bad because I probably would have made a fool of myself in front of all the staff here jumping up and down, like I did in private upstairs when Licia told me Nickenson gained over a pound in this last week!!!!!! AHHH life is good. He was 9.8 last week and hit the scale at 10.10 Saturday! (Keep in mind he's 10 months old, so we still have a LONG way to go) but finally we're turned in the right direction!! Stuffing his face:

Keep posted for the next post aka: this mornings events... hint- Green Eggs and Spam :)