At Zaklanda škola Narnia, the first part of school focuses on nature and the big activity at the end of the unit was going to a forest, cleaning up any litter, and earning a small treasure for the kids’ good deeds.  It was a pretty rainy day, so instead we walked to some areas nearby school and picked up trash there.  It was pretty cold and rainy, but the kids enjoyed it all the same.  In the end we went back to school got the prize and watched a movie. Here are a few photos from that day.  First is Kristianko aka Kiko, he has an older sister at Narnia and is real cute.

 

This is Natalka.  She goes to our church and has a barbie who is a Queen but also can turn into a butterfly.  Originally Natalka was very quiet and I thought she didn’t want to be my friend, but now I have realized she just took a while to warm up to me.  Also, Natalka’s dad looks like Johnny Depp, not a striking amount, but enough to merit calling him Johnny.  Often Natalka is one of the last kids to leave so Burke and I like to say, “Just waiting on Johnny.”

This is Stanka and I know I have written about her several times.  She is downright hilarious. If you look closely, she looks kind of snaggletoothed in this picture, but she’s quite adorable in real life.

The above photo is one of the groups I work with on Mondays, in keeping with the nature theme, the assignment was to go outside and collect whatever they could find to create their own self portrait.  This class is all of yellow class (2nd grade) and a few from green class (1st grade), so I was expecting some pretty simple creations.  As with any projects, a few just made it as quickly as they could so they could go off and play, and a few made some exceptional portraits.  Below is one of my favorites. It looks just like Kika, all the way down to her hair.

This is Danko, you may remember him as the little boy who didn’t tell anyone he could speak English; he just let us figure it out on our own.  I like his self portrait… nice and simple. Also fun fact, he loves dinosaurs (that’s dee-no-sah-roos in Slovak), especially the T-Rex.

All in all, we are having a great time at Narnia.  I love spending time with all the kids and I LOVE every kid in green class.  It feels like I discover a new trait in a kid every week and it makes me appreciate each one of them so much.  I also like green class because they help me with my Slovak, they just don’t know it.  They use such simple words, phrases, and sentence structure that I often find myself listening closely and sometimes deciphering what they say.  What’s funny though is that I’m only supposed to speak English to them, so they are constantly asking each other, “Ako sa povie …. po anglicky?”  which means, “How do you say… in English.”  My favorite was Katka who asked “Ako sa povie banany po anglicky??”  I thought it was so cute because banany is one of the few cognates that our languages have (banany, of course, means banana).