July 30, Final day of school visiting and last night in Barranquilla

It has been a physically challenging 48 hours. I was up much of the night before last between bed and the bathroom and have developed a chest cough. The moving between hot and humid temperatures outside and frigid air conditioning indoors has made it hard to get comfortable with either the hot or the cold. I am also itching from bug bites, mostly from the beach day in Palomino, but maybe also from smaller bites sitting outside at the school most of the day. Everything here is open air. Two more days of malaria medication. While we were at school two of us were offered Pedialyte, the answer to diarrhea in children. I can say with certainty, it is much better cold than room temperature.

Christie woke up Wednesday morning with a case of vertigo. She was wisked off to the hospital emergency and put on bed rest for the day. Wednesday night as we got ready for bed Christie remembered that she had locked all of her medications in the room safe, but when she went to open the safe she couldn't remember the combination. She had done it as soon as she woke up in the morning and was quite dizzy at the time. I had watched her put in the combination, but between us we couldn't get it open. She called the hotel desk for help and after three people tried to use a computerized tool to unlock it, they gave up at 1:30am. I was sound asleep. We left for school this morning and when we returned in the afternoon someone came again and opened it within minutes.

We had a very pleasant last day at school. Three of us started the day in the Transition A, kindergarten. The children are five turning six and the missing teeth of one little girl I met was evidence that these children were definitely kindergarten age. When we arrived at the classroom the teacher was instructing them on workbooks. They were coloring in the pictures that answered whatever question was posed. It was a modern version of the kinds of workbooks I used in school; more colorful, more text and more detailed pictures.

The lesson that followed was a cut and paste. The teachers started by giving out small plastic bags, a small sleeve, that the children immediately started "inflating" by blowing into them. Then she handed out a word sheet that had little boxes with words in them that the children had to cut out. When they had finished the cutting she distributed a second sheet with pictures where they had to paste the words under the correct picture. It was a complex, multi-step exercise, a word review the teacher told us. It was great to observe the range of strategies: one child cut out each word then carefully laid them out on the picture sheet before pasting. Most children cut out the words and then immediately starting pasting them one at a time on the picture page. The challenge came when they found two words that seemed appropriate for the same picture and one word was already pasted down. There were also three "extra" words on the word sheet that didn't apply to any pictures and that created another difficult challenge. For some children the cutting took most of the time. There were lots of scraps and many lost words that didn't make it into the little plastic bags they had been given to hold the cut out words.

The teacher distributed glue in little bottle caps. An efficient process. By the end of the activity some children had a completed sheet, though few had the words correctly placed as many came to adults to ask how to read the words. A few were pairs that had slight differences in spelling, but big differences in meaning: nudo (knot) and nidi (nest); sopa (soup) and sapo (toad). At the end, the children put the worked completed or not in their desks. Two parents arrived to celebrate a birthday and the work session ended.

GabriellaLaura

All during the word activity Laura wanted to do anything but the task. She dawdled and delayed, talked and finally I let her try my camera. She was quick to figure out how to take the picture and change the screen to show the photo. Other children came for a turn and took photos of one another including these:
 Our visit ended with lunch when the teacher put in a video for the children to watch. As they gathered their lunch boxes and cold drinks from the fridge, she started a Pixar movie. Turned out to be Inside Out, a film currently running in US theaters. We left at 10:30 after 2.5 hours to see a surprise the school had prepared for us. We crossed through the courtyard and walked through the elder care space to get back to the main building.
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This is the iguana that lives in a mango tree in the courtyard. It comes down when it feels like it and occasionally enters a classroom. We spotted it the first day on our walk through the school. 

This started out as a photo of three friends and quickly turned into a cumulative group of friends. It was a repeat of the gathering of friends that I had witnessed in the kindergarten at Sabio Caldas. The children love clustering together and they loved having their pictures taken.

The surprise was a performance by the students all in English, from the Lord's Prayer to a song performed by 2nd graders to the thank you at the end delivered by a senior. The real surprise were the dancers who came out in traditional dress and halfway through their performance ripped off the long skirts to change rhythms and dance in shorts. The students were very excited to cheer on their friends. There was also a young girl who sang in English, very off key, but very passionate. The robotics students also showed us what their robots could do. They had received materials to build the robots as a donation, but when they opened the donation there were no instructions. The girls went online and found instructions in English. They had to translate the instructions before they could begin building. These girls have such great confidence and determination.