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 cen
tre 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 t
own 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 goosebump
s 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!!
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