Like a proud parent I must show off what my students wrote and performed. Thank goodness for the magic of technology!! The girl in my New-to-English group was great during practice but was nearly inaudible during taping. No worries, the IT wiz just taped her separately using a hand held microphone and dubbed her voice in. One student absent - again, no problem. He was added in later!

This group of boys was unusually rambuctious earlier this week and I finally had enough. I told them "Enough! I'm tired of this! You need to sit down or go back to class!!" The girl was, as usual, already sitting down. One of the Korean boys looked at me with big eyes and sat down. The other three (German, Korean, and Italian) jumped up and ran out the door. When asked by his classroom teacher why he came back to class early, the Italian boy said, "Mrs. Varela is tired and told us to come back." I so deserved that!

The first graders went on a field trip Wednesday to the Opel car manufacturing plant near Frankfurt. It was amazing! That's all I can say - the percision of the process and the updated working conditions were all state of the art. They work using an order based production system so we saw many different cars on the production line at the same time. We weren't allowed to take any pictures or I would included some here.

Report cards are due Tuesday so I've been cramming in testing this week - I'll probably work on them all day Sunday or I'll never finish.