Book Buddies: Session 2

We had our second Book Buddies session with the Littles today and it went really well!  Last week we had 6 Littles and this week we had 9 (including one who is not on my list... not sure how she is involved but we welcomed her anyway)!  

Nelia & Mark do the "I Spy" center: "I spy a capital K..."

Lovely (my neighbor) and Angela read the ABC book together

(Joy, this is one of the gorgeous books that was purchased with your friend's donation!)

Teacher Dinah (right) checks in on Annaliza and her Little, Jaymar

Adelene cheeses it up while Gillian is hard at work on her sight words worksheet

Teacher Julie Pearl helps Annaliza and Mark

Kenth Lloyd (right) works with his Little, John Lloyd, at the 'clay letters' center

Adelene & Gillian read together

Frederick and Salvador work with Word Family flip books

Nelia & Mark practicing with clay letters

Cheesin' again!

Rhegine (Big, left) and Evalyn work on the Clay Letters center.  We actually had two pairs today that were funny to watch because the Little was actually bigger in size than the Big!  I'm getting used to their sizes here now, but when I come back to American schools I think the kids are going to seem gigantic to me!!

I wish this wasn't fuzzy!  Frederick playing with Mark during our break time!

Some of our Bigs posing while Little, Jaymar, tries to hop in

Love this shot of Marjorie caught off guard! Haha!

We finished with a rousing round of the "Fruit Salad" song, a Filipino classic:

Watermelon, watermelon

Papaya, papaya

Saging, saging, saging (x2)

Fruit salad, fruit salad

So far, most of the brainstorming and preparation has been done by me and although I'm more than happy to do it, I was ecstatic to hear the ideas of my teacher partners today!  They made some great suggestions about how we can improve the sessions and cater more toward the personal needs of our Littles (and Bigs).    They said they were impressed by all the preparation I had done and how it is so "different from anything they would have come up with", but now I'm really excited about how they're taking ownership in it and coming up with ideas of their own.  I'm hoping they'll continue to help the program evolve and want to repeat it when this session ends (at Christmas break) and even after I'm gone!  Those are the goals: novel teaching methods and sustainability!

Here are some dumb/cute videos we took to entertain ourselves while waiting for Dinah to bring the key this morning before Book Buddies:

When they tell me they want to do a "dance" it usually means they want to do the morning exercise the whole school does every day before school.  So I edited out about 45 seconds of calf raises and shoulder shrugs.