Week 4

Football, Festivities, and Fun!

With the start of the 2022 Qatar World Cup and a short week of school due to Thanksgiving, this week was jam-packed with quite a bit of excitement! Wednesday was a half day of classes at Whitman as the second part of the day was "Greening of the School" where each class chose a theme and decorated their homerooms for Christmas. On that Wednesday, I chose to try something new with my pre-algebra students. We just started a unit on percentages so I created an "Escape Room" where students had to work together in teams to solve problems and decipher codes that they would use to unlock new levels and eventually beat the game. The students had a lot of fun and I did as well watching them diligently working through problems to try and beat the game!

I worked with the 7th-grade class in the afternoon on Wednesday to decorate their homeroom. They chose "A Charlie Brown Christmas" as their theme and did a great job decorating the room! Unfortunately, I didn't even think about getting a picture of the room until now, so you'll have to take my word for it!

The weekend ended up being quite cold, rainy, and foggy, but that didn't stop about 40 people from getting together on Saturday morning for an annual American Football Turkey Bowl! Although it rained most of the morning and I was much colder than I ever desire to be, it was fun to get out and play some touch football!

After the game, I got a nice warm shower and then was treated to some traditional Arabic coffee. It reminded me of Ethiopian coffee that I had before as it was quite strong and had a bunch of grounds at the bottom of the cup. The coffee was seasoned with cardamom and overall an extremely tasty drink! Actually getting the coffee was also a fun experience! There are people that stand on the side of the road with silver platters outside of coffee shops that will take your order and then run into the coffee shop to get your coffee for you. They deliver it right to your window so that you don't even have to leave your car. It was honestly really convenient!

Highlights

  1. The "Escape Room" in pre-algebra was an absolute blast! The students loved the activity and I loved implementing something new that I have always wanted to try in a classroom!

  2. Watching the World Cup has been extremely fun especially since we are in the same time zone as all the action!

  3. Greening of the School was a fun experience. Seeing all the Christmas decorations go up and seeing all the creativity was a lot of fun. It was also cool to just hang out with students outside of class.

  4. Thanksgiving! My host family invited friends over and we had an awesome Turkey dinner followed by games and watching more of the World Cup.


Thanks for checking out my blog! If you haven't read about my other weeks in Jordan be sure to go check them out!