Welcome to the Jungle

Teaching is just oodles of fun. I'm finding this out more and more the longer I teach. In my opinion, it is one of the most creative professions because you are always creating new projects and lessons for the kids. It's also great because half the time the projects and lessons are fun for you too--who doesn't love acting like a 10 year old again??

The past couple weeks in my sixth standard class we have been working on a big writing project. All the kids were asked to write an essay about an animals and what the animal sees, hears, and does. They wrote in essay format (with an introduction and conclusion and everything) and really took their time going through all parts of the writing process. For the final drafts of their essay they made them into books and colored them and made cover pages and everything. For the "publish" step in the writing process, the kids all made masks to match the animal they wrote about. Then, this past Friday, we invited Jim and Pam (the RSO directors), Celina (the principal), and a few other volunteers to come watch as each of the kids read their essay. The kids were seriously SO EXCITED to read their essays for the other volunteers and Jim and Pam. I even had housemothers coming up and asking me what sixth standard was up to cause they had been so excited telling their housemothers about it.

 V. Devi was just about the cutest giraffe I've ever seen

Tamilselvi was one of four ferocious lions in the class 

 Savitha the cat

Ragu the cheetah

Some of the jungle cats aka the boys

Nagaraj was a very brave tiger and the first to come up and share his essay

Naveenraj the leopard

This is Vimalkanth reading his essay about being a monkey. He did a great job thinking of specific things his monkey would see, hear and do :)

All the kids did an amazing job on their essay, masks, and their "performance". Some of the kids in this class are at about a second standard reading level and for them to come up in front of the class and principal and RSO directors was a huge accomplishment for them. They were all absolutely spectacular!! 

I am one proud mama bear :)

Vanakkam

PONGAL!

So, on January 14-16, we celebrated Pongal--the biggest Indian holiday next to Diwali. It's a three day celebration all about renewal, cows, agriculture....all kinds of fun stuff! Pongal is a harvest festival celebrated only in Tamil Nadu and Sri Lanka. Pongal takes place right around the winter solstice and is a holiday dedicated to the sun god, Surya. Each day of the festival there are different traditions and meanings but in an effort to not be too long-winded, you can go read about them in depth here.

The main traditions we celebrated at Rising Star were making Kolums and eating sugarcane and Pongal. All of the kids and volunteers also attended a function on the second day of Pongal in the village near Rising Star, Thottanaval. The function in the village celebrated cattle and having a prosperous year this next year. All of the cows are washed and dressed to impress with painted horns and big flower wreaths around their necks. It was a great little field trip taking all the kids into the village to see the decorated cows and all the Pongal festivities.

The kids dressed in their very best walking into the village

On our way, we passed TONS of beautiful Kolum outside the village houses.

Here's a closer look

All the housemothers also dressed to impress for the Pongal function

We had to wait awhile for the function to start...it was the perfect time to take pictures of the kiddos all dressed up! From left: Theresa, Pavithra, Jessy, Jennifer, Tamilselvi and Theerthi

The boys were lookin mighty handsome :)

I have said it before but I will say it again, Kala is awesome. Case and point: she dressed all the boys in her house in matching outfits (the old Rising Star uniform) to go into the village for the festival. They all looked so nice!

Tamilarasi (a housemother) and some of the girls hangin out waiting for the function to start.

These drummers played throughout the whole function. They definitely kept the party goin.

This cow was especially decked out with balloons on its horns.

A proud villager showing off his cattle.

Another proud villager showing off his fancy cattle.

They have even modernized Pongal a bit by also celebrating and decorating the tractors that help for a successful harvest. The two tractors in the village both had big flower wreaths across the front.

My walking buddy on the way back to Rising Star was Mr. Sanjay in UKG--he sure is a cutie.

It was tons of fun to celebrate a new holiday with the Rising Star family. On the last day of Pongal we had a big water fight with the kids that was AWESOME!! We had music and dancing and water balloons....it doesn't get more awesome than that! Pongal was the last big holiday/break from school until the kids go home. My time is really starting to wind down here and I'm getting more and more nervous everyday about saying good-bye to the kids and people here. Hopefully the next three months don't go by too fast :)

Vanakkam

These Faces...

Make everyday really awesome :)

Vanakkam

Happy New Year!

So I'm a week late in my New Year's post but now that all the kiddos are back time is a touch more scarce. Anyways, New Years here at Rising Star was awesome (as are all the holidays with the kids). We had the volunteers here from the Christmas session, as well as all the new longterm volunteers so it was a full house! The Christmas volunteers were awesome and brought noisemakers, silly string, mini glowsticks, and all kinds of other fun things for the kids to ring in the New Year with. We had TONS of fireworks and an awesome dance party--we know how to do New Years right at Rising Star.

The bag of fireworks aka the bag of awesome-ness

we only use the legit stuff

photo credit: M. Vignesh (6th Standard)

The girls waiting for the fireworks show

one of the volunteers brought 2012 silly bandz--they were a hit.

After the fireworks/dance party, we all went and ate dinner in the dining hall and then had a special late night movie night and watched "The Grinch". I have said this many a time but I will say it again: watching movies with the kids is the best way to watch a movie. They really get entrenched in the story and characters--they laugh really loud at the funny parts, they get really tense and focus on the suspense/action parts, and they always cheer and clap when the "hero" (good guy) wins.

After the movie Vinodhini (one of the housemothers) had little masks for all her girls. Jessy was just as cute as can be.

Jessy and Amirtham going to sleep on New Years Ee with their masks.

So after another very successful movie night, the kids headed to bed....except the older boys. Seven of the oldest boys were allowed to stay up until midnight and party in the dining hall with Derek and I. It was the perfect way to ring in the New Year. We danced, had headstand competitions, made a Happy New Year sign made out of flower petals--it was an awesome New Years to say the least.

The boys dancin the night away

I forgot who won this but it was legit nonetheless

The boys took quite awhile making sure this flower sign was perfect.

Happy New Year from Rising Star! The boys from left: Rajesh, Ashok, Deepenraj, Shankar, Krishnamoorthy, and Joseph

I am forever grateful that I get to spend the first four months of 2012 here at Rising Star with these kids--I'm thinkin the rest of the year is gonna have to be amazing if it's off to such a good start. :)

Vanakkam

Santa Claus Came to Town!

MERRY CHRISTMAS BLOGOSPHERE! Christmas day is coming to a close here in India and I have to say that I have never ever had a Christmas as unique as this one. I already recapped the events of Christmas Eve and I was planning on just adding a little onto that post today....but I quickly realized as the day progressed that Christmas Day warranted a whole post just for itself.

We started the day off bright and early: leaving the campus at 7:30am to get to church in Chennai by 9am. They recently opened the first LDS church building in Chennai and it is absolutely BEAUTIFUL! They had a Christmas tree and nativity scene in the lobby and it was such a privilege to have Christmas Sunday in the gorgeous new chapel.

In my "Christmas Dress" ready to take on the day--I couldn't have handled wearing a sari all day long, hence the chuddidhar.

Awesome Nativity in the lobby of the church

With Katie, Craig, Pam and Jim after Sacrament meeting in the church lobby

Because today was Christmas day, church only lasted for an hour. My original plan was to go with Jim and Pam and their granddaughter/grandson-in-law to the Marriott and have brunch, but as Venilla and Vadevu were talking about their possible plans, I made the decision to switch it up and go with them. I haven't spent a ton of time with the live-in staff the last few days so I wanted to spend some of my Christmas with them. Going with them also guaranteed that I would have a very Indian Christmas experience.

Our first stop after church was to go shopping at T. Nagar--a GINORMOUS shopping district in Chennai. It's where you get the best prices and can get any possible thing you need all on one street. The thing with T. Nagar is that it's always swarming with wall to wall people and it's a shopping district geared towards locals, not tourists...which means little to no English is spoken by the shop owners and you are expected to know how to check-out, the random store rules, etc. I have been to T. Nagar twice before this (one of those times is a whole other story in itself) and after those two trips it was decided that T. Nagar would be best tackled if you had a local along to help you....which brings me to today. I had the awesome opportunity to go shopping at T. Nagar with not 1 but 7 locals! Vadevu, Venilla, Stephen, Michael, Dr. Sugunya, Shankar, Sujatha, and I had a marvelous time shopping  and browsing and just enjoying the beautiful Christmas day. We were all able to get things that we have been needing/wanting so it was kinda like we were all our own Santa Claus :) Shopping on Christmas day in a legit Indian bazaar with 7 amazing people?.....that equals up to a pretty good Christmas if you ask me.

The shopping Mecca that is T. Nagar

This is just a small scale of what every store is like--merchandise EVERYWHERE

After our shopping excursion, we started heading out of town back towards Rising Star. Before we left Chennai, though, we stopped at a nice restaurant for a little Christmas lunch/feast. Jim had given Vadevu some money to take everyone to lunch after church, so because Jim was buying....everyone went all out. As we ordered, people would randomly keep adding things to the ticket (I swear each person ordered at least five things). Our table was packed to bursting with all the rices and sauces and chicken and fish: I think it's the most food I've ever seen at any one meal. All the food was delicious (although very, very spicy--my mouth was on fire) and by the time we were paying the bill, we were all slipping into food comas.

This picture gives a scope of the amount of food we ordered...this is only the first batch. I tried to take a picture with everyone when the food first came out, but the food proved to be more enticing for most.

Photo Try #2: The whole gang after the Christmas feast

From the feast we headed back to Rising Star. To round-off the night, Lyndsey and I had decided the day before to have a Christmas movie double feature. We settled in the Green House and tucked into some leftovers from our Christmas Eve dinner while watching How the Grinch Stole Christmas and Love Actually. Lyndsey brought her two kittens over and they snuggled on the couches with us as we all basked in Christmas movie greatness.

I was worried at the start of this week that I would be very lonely and depressed this Christmas, being away from home. I am happy to say, though, that it turned out to be just the opposite. I was surrounded by love, and happiness and Christmas cheer and you really can't ask for anything more when you're spending Christmas on the opposite side of the world from your family. :)

Vanakkam