Today, was much better than yesterday (not that yesterday was bad in any way). I got to work early and walked down the street to take a look at the shops, there is a really good looking bakery (that I may stop at tomorrow morning), a great fruit and vegi stand, and a really cute vintage store (Mackenzie we will definitely be going there while you are here). We had a staff meeting this morning and I just sat in and listened and of course got introduced to the whole staff. A couple of things we have coming up--the athletic carnival tomorrow, practicing for a song that every kid in Australia sings together on the same day, and I think that is about it for the upcoming days.

Class today was much quieter than yesterday and the kids were more well behaved. Today I got to help out with reading groups and then we did handwriting. It was interesting to see the differences in cursive. They do not connect any upper case letters to the next letter, the make an "s" like printing and do not connect it to the next letter and on the practice lines, they start at the dotted line and go to the next straight line instead of having two straight lines with the dotted line in between. After that we did some work with descriptive sentences and my favorite sentence of the day was, "The short fat boy waddled to the lolly store to buy a bag full of lollies and chocolate" Personally I just like it because the boy waddled and went to the lolly store. We had lunch and I talked with one of the other teachers who is doing her "student teaching" and we talked about the differences we have in college, or uni as they say here. In math we did fractions today (so thankful it was not mass!), however I did learn that when they write decimals, the decimal goes in the middle of the numbers not at the bottom and if a number is repeating there is a dot on top instead of line. Finally we had began to work on our science unit for the term, which is "Plants in Action". Today we did the experiment with celery and food coloring to learn about transpiration in plants.

Today, my bus ride took me about 20 minutes longer than usual because the 3:11 bus did not come by and then the 3:30 bus was late. So while I was sitting there I got the pleasure of a drunk lady joining me on the bench. At first she just said hello and was talking about how she was glad it was two females on the bench. Then she started asking about one of the hotels and bars near by and obviously I didn't know. This whole time she is continuing to drink. Then she is getting ready to leave and she asks me what nationality I am, I tell her American, and she decides to start asking me all about America and where I am from. It was just very odd. Finally she left and I was able to sit on the bench by myself for the next 15 minutes waiting for the bus.

When I got home from work, Mike (a supervisor from the states) was here checking out the hotel with the AustraLearn rep from Sydney. The Sydney rep said he was going to arrange something for us all to get together and go watch the world cup in Darling Harbor sometime. They have giant tv screens, floating soccer fields, and bars to watch all of the soccer games on.

Tomorrow should be a fun day. We have the athletic carnival, which I am pretty sure is like a giant track meet. We walk the kids over to the park down the road and do it there all day. It should be a lot of fun. Although, apparently the parents take this stuff way to seriously. Adam said that last year some of the parents thought that the 200m race was too short and they measured it and the inside lane was about 10m shorter than the outside lane. So with about 20 minutes left in the day, they made the school re-run the entire race. Tomorrow will be a nice little change. We have a seminar tomorrow after work (I do not know what it is on yet). I also get the opportunity to go to a teachers federation session with dinner with a bunch of the new teachers, which should be pretty cool.