It Might Be...

...another post about animals. Please excuse me for all the writing dedicated to my adventures with animals, but they have managed to find a way into my daily life that I didn't exactly foresee before I came to Nicaragua.

Today the PE teacher came into show my students a little friend of his:

Size? Larger than my human hand. Location found? The kitchen. 

About a month ago, this guy came to visit at school:

And this one at my house:

I am rethinking my earlier post about the pigeons. The ants have now surpassed them in unfortunate habits. To name a few:

• Finding a way through zipped backpacks and lunchboxes into my students' food. We are all ready for lunch, happy and hungry when... the ants attack. Raid must be found. Backpacks dumped out. Ant hills sought and destroyed. This happens at least once or twice a week. One student even wrote a very impressive poem about the reoccurring ant invasions. More on poems later.
• Living in my desk and a taking up residency between the keys of my keyboard.
• Tingling up your arms and legs as they crawl on you. They are small, so hard to locate. You feel them, but cant always see them. 

Raid is one of my new best friends. Not one of my favorite smells, but it gets the job done. 

___________

Time to talk poetry! I love love love teaching poetry. The last two weeks we have been doing a Monster Poetry Unit. When I first told my students we would be studying poetry they gave me the are you trying to kill me, Miss Eberly? face. I don't like that face. Two weeks later, some most of my students are generally excited about reading poetry, learning a new type of poem, and getting their ideas on paper. Some students have surpassed my expectation on what they can do. They all have a writer's notebook and I see them jotting down their new poems during the day and showing them off to me later. Today in groups they worked on some free verse poems about different colors. 

The Blue Group coping their group poem into their notebooks

Next week we are having a Monster Poetry Bash! I can hardly wait. Students will pick their best poems and copy and decorate them to present to the class. They are all memorizing a children's poem as well that they will present with (hopefully) excellent articulation, pausing at the correct spots in the poem. Be prepared for a bombardment of poetry pictures in the near future. 

xoxoxo

Laura