A Very Big First... the First Day of my First Year of Teaching

This year is the year of many different firsts.  Today marks one of the biggest firsts.  My first day teaching at my first teaching job!  I cannot believe it's over already! I have been imagining this day for years. And it flew by!  I spent hours at the school getting ready, and my co-teachers thought I was crazy for preparing so much!  But it all payed off!  The first day felt so natural!  It felt right to be in front of kids again, to be leading them and helping them learn.  We only have seventeen students in our class.  And five of them were absent today... not sure what's up with that!  Hopefully they'll show up tomorrow!  I am ready to start diving into all the crazy awesome things we will have going on this year!  I'll probably talk about the IB curriculum later on, but it makes me so excited for the awesome things that we will be able to do this year!  God is so good and I am so blessed to have this job.  

I have included some pictures of the school, Sekolah Pelita Harapan (SPH) and my classroom.  Hope it gives you a glimpse into what my new home is like!

The school halls are all open like this, and some of them are decked out for kids to play in during recess and before school starts!

 This is right in the middle of the junior school building.  There are actually four buildings in the junior school.  My building is the one that is straight ahead. Grade three is on the second floor, but my room is on the other side of the building, overlooking some soccer fields.

We have two pools at SPH.  This pool is the round pool, the location of lots of BBQs!

The Junior School playground

The second pool is an Olympic sized pool.  How crazy is that!?

Welcome to the grade three pod.  We share this common area, where the students have their lockers, we have some group work tables, a mini-stage, and a reading area.  Off of the pod are all the individual classrooms.  We have three grade three teachers.  We also have an ESL teacher, Bahasa teacher, and staff room that are in our pod as well.

Welcome to 3B!

 The view as you walk into the room:

 You may notice that my name is Miss Rachel on everything.  Some Indonesians do not have family names.  So it is not customary to use last names when referring to one another.  Everyone is Miss or Mr.  First Name.  For the Indonesian teachers, we say Ibu (Miss) or Pak (Mr.).

And I can't break tradition!  Here I am all ready for my first day of school standing at my front door!  Pretty boring front door... I need to get a wreath or something :) 

And here are just a few of my amazing students on our first day! I am so excited to have them in class this year!