It is Wednesday evening at 9:00pm. Tim is on a conference call, Abi is doing her homework, and I am trying to add some more pictures to last weeks blog....it continues to be a very slow process. Last night I tried several times to load three pictures and after they were "rejected" four different times....I gave up. I will try again to night.

The weather has cooled off a bit after several days of rain. Tonight is a gorgeous night...two of the bridges are lit up and we can see the third one in the distance.

I started teaching today. Teaching what you ask???? Teaching English at a Chinese migrant school. I will be helping in two classes. One 4th grade class and one 6th grade class. I met both teachers today and the 4th grade students. Wow!!! The 4th grade class has 56 students.....and we thought the class sizes in the US were big. The kids are sooooooo cute. They are very happy to have "foreigners" at their school. Everywhere I went today I was greeted with smiling faces and big "hellos". It is not going to be hard to fall in love with these kids. After just one day I wanted to bring most of them home with me. The school has 2500 students....k-9th grade. All the students are children of migrant works. Their parents work in factories or at construction sites and come from outside of Shanghai. Previously.....students from outside of Shanghai were not allowed to go to the public schools. That law was changed this year but many of theses families can not afford uniforms and extra expenses related to the public school system in Shanghai.

My job is to help them with pronunciation. I was told that I would be reading to the students and helping them with vocabulary. They do not want me to speak Chinese to the students....only English. I already broke that rule.....oops!!! I practiced my introduction in both English and Chinese....the 4th graders would not have understood any of my introduction if I had not used both. I think it is going to be really fun. The 4th grade teacher does not speak very much English....the 6th grade teacher sounded like he spoke very good English......Who knew I would be teaching English to a bunch of adorable kids.?? Life takes us in interesting directions sometimes!!!