Busy Day

Rather full schedule today, but first thing is first. We learned how to sing "Happy Birthday" in Samoan today. Tuesday was my Mom's birthday, and I did give her a call that day. This song is for you, and the enjoyment of everyone else.

~Manuia lou aso fanau    x3
Fa'amanuia le Atua  (God's Blessing to you).~

We actually didn't start our day until 9am this morning, and it was nice to have a little extra down time before we started. I slept in a little, but then had a chance to look up some info and read a few emails. Our first presentation today was with a guest speaker from the American Samoa Historic Preservation Office. He talked about different services they can provide in education, what their office does, and a big overview of the history of this territory, which was really interesting. There are two National Historic Landmarks here in addition to about 800 sites that the preservation office has on file. Pretty cool. Archaeology is one of my secret interest areas. May have something to do with Indiana Jones but interesting, nonetheless :-) This presentation was followed by another language class, where we practiced our basic conversation skills and objects in the classroom vocabulary.

After lunch we met with in our content areas again- science for me - with the local teacher. Today, we discussed standards and benchmarks and how you unbundle them for your classroom. Our local teacher also showed us some examples of projects she incorporated with her students including a music video on a marine phylum (or group of organisms for  those of you who do not know the technical terms in taxonomy). The video we watched was on Echnidermata, which includes sea cucumbers and sea urchins. This was a three hour long session.

Finally, we had a session with one of our WorldTeach leaders on Teacher Talk Time (TTT) and Student Talk Time (STT) in the classroom, finding the balance, and encouraging your students to be involved in discussions. Nice little informative session before breaking before dinner.

After dinner I did a 25 minute workout including some shuttle runs and strength exercises for my legs and thighs in between. Then, I decided I wanted to play around with some light painting using the moon as my light source. This means I left the shutter open and moved the frame around during a 13 second time period. Here's some of the results:

I did a few light painting shots using the building lights:

This last one used some street lights:

Ua lelei. Tofa soifua. (That is all. Okay, bye.)