Bear Park

As some of you may have heard, I finally got a teaching job. 'Officially' they have offered me a job as an early childhood educator for the process of my work permit. 'Unofficially' i've been hanging out with little kiddos for a little over 5 weeks now. I work with a team of three other teachers in our classroom since we have the highest count of little persons. We have anywhere from 14-18 kids depending on the amount of time and day of the week the parent wishes their tyke to the come. The way the early level schools work here is the child is transitioned into the classroom at the time of his or her birthday. It has its pluses and minuses. Say you have a couple 5 year olds who have birthdays in January, they'd all start together. Then you have a kid that doesn't turn 5 till March or even April, they wouldn't transition into that class until then. So, while they are now closer to being developmentally equal, they could possibly be socially behind since those kids have already formed relationships with each other. For the most part though i really appreciate their teaching philosophy here and this place, like a good number of European countries, is more family orientated and they take their vacation days religiously. One week, maybe 2 kids are 'on holiday' with their families and the next week another kid is, regardless of actual holiday days. One little girl has been gone with her family the entire time i've been at the learning centre but we get updates from their trip to South Africa that we share with the kids who squeal with delight when they see pictures of her and who fight over who gets to wear her sun hat in the playground.

We apparently have a sister school in Boulder, CO that we have a teacher exchange program with. One of my co-teachers will be heading up there soon for the rest of the year pending her US work visa. I'm not sure how strict they stick to the 'exchange' aspect since i haven't heard news of them sending one down here but small world anyway, huh?

And now that you probably learned more about the education system of a small school on the under, yet beautiful, side of this planet than you ever wanted to know, over and out.