The Christmas festivities in my community pretty much revolved around the Christmas party at school. The day before the party, we all came to school to decorate. Our materials were a few sheets of construction paper, lots of white printer paper, scissors, and several staplers. So my eighth grader girls and I spent several hours listening to music while we cut and stapled strips of paper into colorful chains, created huge dangling paper mobiles, and made small paper ornaments for the tree. I taught them how to make paper snowflakes and that amazed them to no end. We were set.
The students then began hanging our decorations around the classroom using the staplers—stapling to the walls, ceiling, around the chalkboard, on the window frames, everywhere. And when our tree arrived (the boys had been out with my co-teacher Waltin procuring the perfect specimen), everyone began draping and stapling (yes, stapling) more decorations onto the tree. It was beautiful.
(The tree decorations are my snowflakes, a lone pink balloon, a few sticky bows, and the small paper ornaments the students made. I especially like the one that says “MERRY”. The students ran out of paper before they could make “CHRISTMAS”, but we decided to put it on the tree anyway.)
We had such a fun time setting up for the party!
Then the next day everyone came to school for the party. We feasted on cake and cookies and chips and exchanged our Secret Santa gifts. It turns out my Secret Santa was one of my favorite students named Donny. He’s incredibly funny and intelligent, but also incredibly talkative. Consequently, he was one of the first students I learned the name of; because I had to immediately begin telling him to be quiet. But he’s a big sweetheart, and I was so touched by my gift of two beautiful skirts that I had to embarrass him by taking a photo with him. The student I drew, Baiona seemed really excited by her gifts (girl stuff: soaps and lotions, hair clips, earrings, and an assortment of candy). I even got a surprise gift from one of my sixth graders named Selidaka. She ran up to me and put a foam flower in my ear, handed me a rolled decorative mat filled with more flowers and ran away. It was adorable. I chased after her to thank her and to get her to take a picture with me.
The rest of the afternoon was spent dancing. Dancing is a really big deal here. I enjoyed watching the students having fun, and several of my students surprised me with how talented they are. And some of them even convinced me to dance with them a little bit. Some of the other teacher joined in and pretty soon we were all hysterically laughing and falling around on the dance floor. It was a great time!
Two of my favorite second graders having a blast on the dance floor.
Me and some of the eighth grade girls hanging out at the party.
Merry Christmas!
--Christy
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