Quality Schools International

Dear Ones,
I love our school. We barely have 40 students and it is just perfect for that. Maybe I love it because it is painted my favorite color - turquoise. All QSI schools require security guards, so we have 3 guards doing rotating shifts. However, in the 3 years the school has been open there hasn't been anything happen. Art said that one day he was outside teaching PE using a parachute and suddenly he thought his class was larger. Sure enough, a whole bunch of neighborhood kids had climbed the fence to play with the parachute. He let them play for awhile and then shooed them back home. The grounds around the school are really pretty and peaceful with flowers, fruit trees, and a grape arbor full of fat grapes. The apartments surrounding our school are just the opposite. I see kids hanging over the balconies, playing in the dirt, or just sitting in their doorways. It must be really hard for them to see the colorful playground equipment at our school and know they can't use it.

Art is the director of the school. His wife, Julie, teaches 5 & 6 year olds (9 students) and come from Arizonia. Mike is a new teacher for the 7 & 8 year olds ( 12 students) and is a retired teacher from Arizonia. Then Nick teaches the 9 & 10 & 11 year olds (4 students). He is also a new teacher this year from PA. And Marc from Canada teaches the secondary students ( 2 students in his class). We have a computer guy, Ivan, who I haven't met yet and Svetlana teaches Russian classes. My class gets to go to her every Friday afternoon. I should go with them and learn the Russian ABC's. And I teach the 3 & 4 year olds (11 students) which are the most adorable kids in the school. I have Dinara for my aid who speaks Russian to help me with parent translations, etc. She has been wonderful helping me get my room set up. We don't use grade levels here - just ages!

Art had told us ahead of time over and over not to bring any teaching supplies. I decided I would pack a suitcase of my favorite stuff, so I took my suitcase to school the last days when I was cleaning my classroom. I realized that most of my stuff was my favorite stuff and I was trying hard to pack light with only stuff I needed until Christmas. The suitcase weighed 70 lbs. which would cost me $150 extra, so at Maleika's house I finally got it down to 50 lbs. I WAS SO GLAD THAT I BROUGHT IT! I walked into my preschool room and the walls were totally bare! They didn't even have a number line or the alphabet for me to put up. So the first week I worked my buns off just turning that room into something that screamed Preschool. I had to make everything from scratch except for some of the stuff I brought.

The parents of my students for the first time had a choice to bring their child a full day ( 8-2:30) or a half day (9 - 1:00) Only 4 choose the half day, but that means there is an hour every morning that I don't want to start all the lessons because part of the class will miss them. So I decided to do centers every morning until 9:00. I love it!! I have 6 centers set up around the room - library center with pillows and big books, block center, puzzles & games, cutting & pasting, writing, and mathematics. When the kids come in they have their name on a stick and they have to put it in the appropriate space on the bulletin board. I was blown away at how the 4 year olds have caught on.

Art had told me that he wouldn't teach my class for any kind of money. He told me I would have wailers all morning. There was not one child that cried. They came in and saw all the fun stuff set out and were on a mission. They didn't even want to bother to say goodbye to their parents. Art was amazed!

On the first day of school I have always made gingerbread boys and girls for all the kids. I read them the Gingerbread Boy, tell them that I made them some gingerbread cookies, go to my cupboard and they are gone!! Then we go on a search of the school looking for the cookies and I can introduce them to the new teachers! I've done it for so many years, making cookies for all the other grade level classes the night before school starts , that it is no big deal.

Well, making cookies in Kazakhstan, was a HUGE deal. There were roadblocks at every turn and I wanted to forget the whole thing, but I tackled it. Dianara went with me to the grocery store to get molasses, ginger, cinnamon, nutmeg, and cloves. The only ingredient that we found was ginger, so I used honey instead of the molasses. We couldn't find any raisins, so I ended up getting a sack of trail mix that had pictures of raisins on the cover. Then when I came home and started making them it took forever to find everything I needed to mix them up. There were no measuring cups, so I just guessed at everything. I had to roll them out with a glass because there was no rolling pin. I had brought the gingerbread man cookie cutter with me thank goodness. Then I couldn't get my oven to work! That was about the last straw, but I called Nick who knows some Russian and he came over. The oven doesn't work unless you turn on the timer.

So I headed to school the next day with 30 of the cutest little gingerbread boys I think I have ever made. My kid's eyes were big as saucers when I looked in my backpack and the cookies were gone. I had taped a little tiny paper gingerbread boy on every door that we were going to and the kids giggled with glee whenever they saw one. We found them just in time for snack and had fun sharing all the rest with the school. They were a big hit!

Got to go. Love, Me