Convenient volcano, Color my world, Russian folk dancing, 59 tornadoes, Doubledecker, Second Baptist-'Alraightt!'

It's hard to believe we are into week 14 of our time at Ole Miss...another week flying by and only one more week of class to go... It was nice to have Robert around until Thursday of this week thanks to the volcano in Iceland which caused so much havoc around the world but which I was secretly very grateful for as it meant I could spend more time with my boyfriend in Mississippi!

I continue to learn a lot from the classes that we have been taking here at Ole Miss, whether it is through the direct instruction from lecturers, the projects we have had to submit, the presentations we have done or the tests we have taken it has definately been a valuable experience. I also am enjoying more than anything else the time I have been having with the preschoolers in Willie Price Nursery Unit and in fact this time has made me rethink my future in terms of being more open to early years work as an option for a career path... This week in Willie Price the theme was Transportation and so we were looking at different activities based around this topic, the children were designing cars and flying paper aeroplanes and on Friday they had their race day when they paraded their home made car costumes through the school! Each morning when they come together for circle time the kids enjoy singing and I wanted to share the 'Hello Friend' song with you that has now been stuck in my head for 3 months...
'Hello Friend, what do you say? It's gonna be a happy day! Greet your friend, boogie on down, give them a bump and turn around, then sit down.'

The children then sing the weather song...'What's the weather, what's the weather, what's the weather like today? Tell us Jane-Reeves, what's the weather, what's the weather like today?'
Over the past few weeks I have rediscovered the value of making singing a daily party of young childrens routines and this has been reinforced in Willie Price. We have days of week songs, months of the year songs, clean up songs, getting ready for snack songs and many more! I had the opportunity to teach the children about primary and secondary colours this week through my Science project, it was received very well and I definately will use the experiment in the future. The children were each given some white frosting and Graham crackers and using different colours of food colouring we mixed combinations and spread our secondary colours on our crackers after making predictions as to what the two colours would make!

We had a test during our Special Education class on Monday which covered all the material we have been learning the past few weeks including emotional and behavioural disorders, learning strategies and looking at the ID, superego and ego and how conflicts here can create various defense mechanisms. Dr Chessin's class focused on lesson planning in more detail and classroom philosophy, we did a useful activity where we had to come up with and submit our own philosophy for the classroom. In our Tuesday evening class a guest speaker told us about IDEA legislation and worked through the 13 different categories of disability that exist and we thought through some scenarios related to inclusion.

The sun shined for most of the week in Oxford and so much of our time this week was spent walking or sunbathing around campus or visiting Holli's sweet-tooth for icecream...my favourite is cake batter!! The time came for Robert to leave on Thursday and I was thankful that he made it back safely on Friday carrying a much heavier load than when he came, I graciously passed on a huge chunk of my wardrobe to him for the trip home...! He left just in time for the winds started to blow on Friday and I felt as if I was in Kansas like Dorothy with all the tornadoes hitting Mississippi, we had warnings left, right and centre and so we were kind of excited that we might actually see one but Oxford only got the tail end of the crazy weather.

We had a great weekend despite the weather...Friday night we celebrated our friend Jerusha's birthday and so we headed to an Indian restaurant called Maharajas to surprise her... I enjoyed the night, sitting with two Italian guys, a German girl and a Portugese guy, we talked about Europe all night and it was sooo refreshing after being with Americans for such a long time! It's crazy how people end up in Oxford, they were there studying black holes as part of their Physics research....! After dinner we headed to a dance studio and spent the night learning folk dances from all over the world, my favourite being this Russian step dance, Ruth and I were not the best at it! I taught them some dances from ceildhs at home which everyone enjoyed learning, especially the tush push!!!



Saturday was the day set for the annual Doubledecker festival which is an arts and music festival that takes place in the square. Normally the festival runs all day on the Saturday but because of all the fears over the tornadoes it was broken up so the music was on Saturday and the arts were on Sunday. We headed down to the Lyric on Saturday afternoon to listen to some of the bands and get more of a feel for the quirky town we've been living in for the past few months... I enjoyed listening to 'Dent' and a 'Weezer' cover band who set up stage in a girls back garden! There was a very chilled out atmosphere with everyone just milling around enjoying the nice day. At night a stage was set up and we went to listen to Sharon Jones, an amazing soul/funk diva who was just an incredible singer and entertainer... there was something really unique about the feel, it has been described by others as a mini mardi-gras. It was a highlight of my trip in MS so far...

On Sunday Ruth and I decided that we would like to visit Second Baptist, the churches here are still predominently segregated and so this was a unique experience in that we were the only white people in church. I loved this worship service though, the gospel choir gave me goosebumps they were so good, it's the first time I have videoed church! We had to stand up and introduce ourselves and it felt a little strange to stand out so much in church but everyone was so welcoming and I absolutely loved being a part of the service where the 'Alraights' and the 'Amens' are flowing!!

Weeks 11, 12 and 13... Chaotic schedules...Finishing school...Funny cards...Hot tubs and speed boats...Robert...The Queen meets 'Elvis'...Volcanoes...

My blog has been somewhat neglected over the past couple of weeks due to a crazy amount of work, presentations, tests, teaching and then the arrival of my boyfriend Robert at long last!

The past couple of weeks at Ole Miss have been really great, I am enjoying each and every of the experiences I am getting here in Mississippi and am thankful to have made the decision to do a semester of study abroad here.

Week 11 took the normal format in terms of classes and placement but I had the extra responsibility of teaching my three day lesson plan to my first grade class in Lafayette. I really enjoyed teaching the class about the lifecycle of the frog and the format of the lessons I had planned meant that I was able to interact closely with the students through the week. A highlight from teaching was on Thursday when we came together to put the components of the visual lifecycle we had created on our poster and reviewed facts, seeing how much they had learnt from the lessons made it worthwhile. I definately will miss my teacher and my students from that classroom, on Thursday they had their egg hunt and I enjoyed being a part of that, running through a field looking for Easter eggs to put in their baskets. They each wrote me a goodbye card, one of the funniest included the message...'I never knew Leprechauns existed until I met you!' I also received a book from them called 'Babar's USA' all about a family of elephants who travel all over the States, a really sentimental gift I will be able to use in my teaching in the future.

I also had opportunity to present my book 'Harry's haircut' to my preschool class this week. The book I made follows the story of Harry who needs a haircut but has a very funny experience with the hairdresser who cuts it too short then too curly, too sparkly, too frizzy etc. The children laughed when they saw Harry and each of the silly hairstyles! I'm pleased with how well this project went. I now have to complete my Science project and reflective paper and I will be finished with my assignments in Willie Price. I continue to learn a lot from Willie Price, the theme for week 11 was 'Bunnies and Chicks' and so we made all kinds of Easter decorations to go along with this theme.

Despite having lots of work we still took some study breaks, the highlight from this week being chilling in a hot tub!

Due to Easter we had Friday off and so I spent the day on a friends speed boat on Lake Sardis, a great way to chill out after a busy week! I also had the opportunity to go to a special service for my friend Rae's Grandad who had been a pastor for 50 years. This service was held in a 'primitive baptist' church and definately ticks the cultural experience box! A lot of gospel and a lot of Amens! Ruth spent the weekend in San Francisco with family while I enjoyed visiting friends and spent Easter Sunday eating dinner with a family from church!

So the day finally came for Robert to arrive in Memphis, after lots of travelling and lots of interrogation (Robert was born in Iraq!) he made it... On Monday of week 12 we went to pick him up and bring him down to the sunny South.

Despite having Robert here I still had classes to go too and this week the focus moved in special education to emotional and behaviour disorders and from there to speech difficulties. I continue to learn from these classes and see many different approaches to this subject through these sessions. We were preparing to be tested in Dr Chessin's class and so spent a lot of time reviewing information and learning more about instructional strategies and professional resources.

On Tuesday evening in our night class we had to present out classroom management showcase and hand in our plan that coincides with this. This project has kept me busy for the last couple of weeks and so I was thankful when the day came to hand this work over and to showcase what I had been doing. The assignment was to create a classroom management plan covering important areas such as rules in the classroom, system for rewarding, a behaviour strategy, a plan for contacting parents and including your philosophy for the classroom. As well as a written plan we also had to create and showcase how this plan would play out in the classroom. Mine was based around the popular children's series the 'Berenstain Bears' this went down really well as it heavily influenced the early years of my classmates' education. My plan followed the theme of bears, ranging from rules following the acronym of 'bear' to a reward system based on the 'bear buck.' I was pleased to see my effort rewarding gaining 100% for my showcase.

On Wednesday evening Robert and I headed off on a trip (was excused from class for Thursday/Monday and had Friday as a day off due to Chancellor's inauguration!) to Pittsburgh to visit with friends for the weekend. Our flights were really delayed and so at 3am we finally made it to Pennsylvania and met up with our friends. We stayed at Geneva College Wednesday and Thursday night, visiting friends we know there and seeing the different sites in and around that college. It was strange to come from Ole Miss to such a small, Christian college and the weather was also a bit different, very cold compared to what we have down here! On Friday afternoon Robert and I headed to my friend Laura's family home for the weekend where her older sister Bekah and husband Tony were meeting us from Philadelphia along with Kait and Brenda who I stayed with over Spring break. The house was full all weekend, we enjoyed eating out for breakfast, watching the Blind Side (amazing movie, all about a footballer who goes to Ole Miss-I spent the entire film shouting out things I had seen or knew!!!), eating more food, visiting Grace RP church, meeting some of my parents old friends, playing with Nerf guns, learning American football and eating more! A great weekend was had by all and we were sad to say goodbye on Monday morning.


We made it back to Mississippi on Monday evening and were met by Ruth and Rae who had plans for us, we headed to IHOP and then to our mystery location which turned out to be 'Graceland too.' This trip goes down as possibly the funniest/wierdest experience I have ever had in my life.... I don't even know where to begin in my description of it...We turned up at a house with two huge lion posts, tinsel wrapped around their necks and Rae goes up to the door and shouts for Paul... Paul appears a few minutes later looking thoroughly deshevelled with his teeth flapping up and down when he talks, we pay the five dollars to come inside and so unravels the most ridiculous Elvis tour ever.... The house is filled from wall to wall, ceiling to floor with memorabilia of Elvis, from cardboard cut outs, to blankets, to curtains, bathtub, to every record he ever recorded. However...our tour guide seemed to be a little farfetched in his descriptions...Apparently (according to Paul) he has been visited by the FBI/CIA three times, 3 presidents have been, George Bushes daughters, Tom Cruize's dog, Pamela Anderson, Sean Connery, every policeman in the state of Mississippi and infact the Queen of England herself took a visit to Holly Springs Mississippi to check out Paul's collection! Amazing! I had to stand well back from Paul during the tour, a fit of giggles that just didn't seem to shift made it impossible to look at him as he exclaimed all of this with a straight face, egged on by both Robert and Ruth. Paul named his son Elvis surprisingly and has apparently been offered millions of dollars for each and every part of his vast collections from people like MTV and the actual Graceland. I quickly learned to take everything he said with a pinch of salt, a man who has clearly gone crazy after many years of having a house open to the public 24/7 and endless repititions of his tour speeches! Definately something I will never forget!

On Tuesday I was back in Willie Price where the theme for this week was 'Creepy Crawlers' the children did all kinds of experiments including making ant hills from sand and spiders from thumb prints. On Tuesday evening we had our normal night class where we had a guest speaker talking about Autism, a useful lecture that solidified what I already knew on the subject. We visited a Greek resaurant after class, there were only a few 'authentic' dishes however according to my expert boyfriend!

Class continued as normal on Wednesday looking at delayed language and at having a personal stance towards education and having a philosophy for your classroom.

Robert continued to meet friends as the week went on and on Thursday he had a taste of authentic Southern food visiting Ruth and I's 'favourite' restaurant Ajax. We spent time with friends on Thursday night eating Pecan and Derby pies and doing dances from all over the world including Greece and Russia!

I completed a test for Dr Chessin this week and was happy to get results back on Friday which told me I had achieved full marks on part one and 28/30 on part two. I am happy with how well my marks have been going during my time at Ole Miss.

On Friday Robert and I headed to 'Rowan Oak' where William Faulkner lived, this was really educational as he is the most influential writer from Mississippi.

Saturday was Robert's due date to leave Mississippi, head to Amsterdam, fly from there to Birmingham, catch another plane to Belfast and be at a job interview for Belfast Royal Academy on Monday morning. Would have all been fine if a volcano had not decided to erupt in Iceland causing havoc worldwide....oh well...more time in Oxford for Robert then!!!