Another Sunday...

So this Sunday I played violin in church again in the morning. It's great knowing I can be a part of the church community, even for a short time. All the lovely old people know my name and come and talk to me about their lives. :) I like it. I feel loved and accepted and like I can bring joy to their lives too. 

John and Daphne invited me out to their home again for lunch, because time is running out... only 1 Sunday left in Tara after today. This time I took the battery in my camera!

Here is their lovely back porch/conservatory.... I love it so much. We ate lunch out there in the cool breeze. I felt so completely at peace! :) 

Daphne fussed over me when I told her I hadn't been eating properly and fed me lots of vegies and icecream. :) I was able to share lots of my concerns with her as we cooked lunch. I really enjoy my time with them. I think lunch with them will be my favourite Tara memory. After lunch, I played their piano and had a great time chilling out. :)

John and Daphne :)

Me with Daphne...

This is a wheat field... almost ready for harvesting. The camera doesn't really show up how pretty it looks.

Cars, interviews and Toowoomba...

This past week has been very busy and full of interesting experiences. On Wednesday afternoon, I had my WIMBA conference with some of the other interns placed outside of Brisbane. It was great to hear from everyone and see what others have been up to in their teaching. It's a pretty novel experience using WIMBA...

The kids weren't too bad for the second half of the week. My lessons are going well and Joel seems happy to leave the room fairly regularly and leave them to me. I dealt with a fair amount of fighting over money... some kids have up to $15 at school with them each day! They lend it to each other and then get upset when they can't have the money back again! They continue to amuse me... I'm afraid I laughed at the wrong time on Thursday as I was trying to discipline one boy... I was sitting with the kids on the carpet, teaching something or other, and all of a sudden, one of the kids yells out, "Miss, Tyler's licking your chair!" I look down in annoyance to see that he was in fact licking and chewing on the wooden arm of my chair. I tried so hard to keep a straight face... but I laughed as I told him how revolting it was to put yucky things in your mouth. Then I tried to tell the kids to settle and stop laughing, but they just said, "You're laughing Miss!" Haha...

On Thursday afternoon, I packed my suit and headed off to Toowoomba for my Ed QLD interview on Friday morning. I barely made it out of Tara when my car started misbehaving. I feel like I've had every possible problem with my car over the last couple years; I've blown up the radiator, had the alternator fixed numerous times, had flat batteries... but this time, it was a new problem. YAY. This time something was going wrong with the overdrive function. I won't pretend to know anything about it, for fear of sounding very silly with my very inexpert description of the problem. All I know is that if I drove with my hand on the gearstick, then the car worked properly.

So I drove all the way to Dalby with one hand on the steering wheel and the other holding the gearstick still. If I went over a bump in the road, the overdrive would turn itself off and the car would rev really hard until I wiggled the gearstick again. Haha. It's kind of funny now... but it wasn't at the time. When I arrived in Dalby I drove straight to a mechanic. He took my car for a drive and then told me that he didn't have time to fix it, but that if I gave the stick a bit of a tap everytime it played up, I should get to Toowoomba ok. He didn't exactly boost my confidence, but he gave me the number of a mechanic in Toowoomba to call. So I kept going and made it to Toowoomba. I pretty much leapt from the car when I arrived at Ruth Louden's house. Haha. I was so glad to be with people and escape the silly car. :)

I spent Thursday night with the Louden's. It was so lovely to be in a home again, with people who I knew! It felt like an incredible luxury to sit down to dinner at a dinner table and eat food that I didn't have to cook. To walk on carpet and shower in a nice clean bathroom, and to sleep in a bed that didn't sag in the middle, and to feel warm and comfortable and at home. :) I really enjoyed my time with Ruthie. In the morning, I got dressed for my interview... and had lots and lots of nervous energy. Haha. But I think I did look very cute for the interview... with my heels and stockings and cute shirt and little business skirt!! :)

So my interview was at Aubingy House... the regional office for Ed QLD in the Darling Downs region. It was a huge, imposing old looking building on a very busy street. Everything was very formal. I went inside and I was asked to sit down and wait until exactly 10:15am. At 10:15am, a lady came out and took me to a small room with a table and a chair. She gave me a clipboard folder with a sheet of questions on it and left the room. I had 15 mins to think about the questions they would ask me. The questions couldn't have been better if I had written them myself!!! God really provided for me in that! I was asked 5 questions:
1. Explain the process you would go through to plan a unit of work.
2. Imagine you are planning a SOSE unit, describe how you would incorporate literacy and numeracy.
3. How will you deal with different needs in the classroom.
4. How will you create a safe a supportive learning environment.
5. Imagine you are posted somewhere unfamiliar. Explain how you would get to know the students, staff and community.

I have just written a SOSE unit that integrates many Literacy concepts, and I am already in an unfamiliar location. My children certainly present the full variety of needs that can come up in a classroom, and I've never seen a school more in need of a SAFE learning environment. I felt really confident once I saw those questions!!! :) At exactly 10:30am, another lady came to the room and escorted me through a maze of offices to the interview room. I had two interviewers on my panel. They were both lovely and seemed very impressed with my work and responses. Normally the interview lasts for half an hour.... mine went for 45 mins. :) So I feel pretty happy that I had so much to talk about! I left Aubingy House walking on air!!

Lauren and Emily met me then and we went out for lunch and took my car to the mechanic. They weren't quite sure what was wrong and were very busy... but they decided to work on my car anyway... sometimes being young and female and looking cute and helpless is a great way of getting help! We visited a beautiful garden after lunch to wait for my car to finish. I haven't seem such a lovely garden in a very long time.. it was a very peaceful way to spend the afternoon.

Lauren, Em and I after lunch!!

Ruthie and Ruthie :)

Very happy-to-be-finished-interview me in the garden... Haha...

Soooo pretty! I would love a garden like this!

I wanted to pick a yellow rose, but Em and Lauren wouldn't let me... I just wanted one!!

The cool hedge clipping...

Laying in the sun... :)

Finally, they finished with my car and $170.00 later, I was on the road again. Apparently they replaced some wiring that was faulty and the bushes... whatever that means...
I got back to Tara at about 7:30 Friday night, exhausted, but happy to have the interview and car ordeal over. :)

Tuesday already...

My week is half over already... I breathe a big sigh of satisfaction. :) Things are going really quite well. I have taught full days so far this week and have found that I enjoy the greater workload more than sharing the teaching with Joel. I'm able to keep on top of the curriculum and behaviour management much better.

Below is the finished work of art from Friday's painting time. The kids did such a great job... but you can definitely tell that some have more artistic flair than others!!

Tomorrow I'll have my online conference with uni and then on Friday I have my big Ed QLD interview to look forward to. This is a pretty busy week.

Hanora moved in yesterday. She seems really quite nice. A little eccentric perhaps, but I guess Erin and I are too in our own separate ways. She seems a little horrified by the lack of furniture and comforts in this house... but to be honest I am getting pretty used to making do with what's available. I had forgotten that we didn't have a microwave until Hanora asked about it last night. Haha.

Bring on Week 4...

I've spent my Sunday afternoon planning for week 4. This week I am responsible for all teaching duties. I will have my class all to myself Monday - Thursday. On Friday I will be in Toowoomba for my Education QLD interview!

The weekend has been fairly good. I spent Saturday catching up with things like washing, shopping and cleaning. It was a pretty restful day... I even got to take a siesta in the afternoon... such bliss. :)

When Erin and I sent shopping on Saturday morning, I ran into many of my kids in the shops and street. They are always so excited and surprised to see me, sometimes I think that kids don't imagine that teachers have lives outside of the school. I bought raffle tickets from one of my girls in the Tara Scouts... just like a nice, supportive teacher... she was so pleased with me. I enjoy seeing the kids outside of school, it feels more like a community out here than it does in big city schools.

Erin and I thought we would check out the one clothing store in Tara... so we walked into "the Modern Trend" as it is called. We walked around for a bit, checking out the clothes, and a guy in his high-vis work clothes came to us. He fished through a dress rack and pulled out a red, rather raunchy dress. He held it up and said something like, "you girls are nice and tall, this would look good on you." He then checked the dress size, "It's a 12 though," he says and then proceeds to actually openly look us both up and down. "I don't think either of you would be a 12," he says, and then, "No, I reckon about a size 10!" He must have taken our sort of shocked/bemused silence as a yes, and says, "I'm pretty good at taking sizes." We both made non-commital answers and quickly left the store. Haha... we walked about 10 metres down the street before we looked at each other and started laughing... Some people out here are so strange and so rude! I must say, it is a rather unpleasant experience to be looked up and down so obviously! We certainly won't be making any return trips to "The Modern Trend".

On Saturday night I went out to the home of one of my students for Bible study. It was a great night, hanging out with some of the young Christian families in Tara. They were studying 'the way of the master' series, so we talked about sharing our faith. I really enjoyed the Christain company. I think my student is going to think that he can't escape me though... I'm at school, at church and have now even been to his home. Haha.

This morning I played violin in church. It's great to be adopted as part of the community so quickly, and great to be able to find a community church. Three of my students were at church this morning, and were very excited to come up to me after church and ask me about my violin and beg for different activities at school on Monday. 

Erin roller-blading in the house...

Very girly, un-gangster me and my gangster housemate...

Artsy days...

So today was Friday again! YAY! Halfway through internship now! I had a pretty exciting day with the kids, covered a lot of SOSE and Indigenous issues, and finally got to do some artwork with them!

Happily painting our Indigenous wall display...

Today Erin and I were also able to celebrate the addition of a table and chairs to our little home. haha. We celebrated Friday and the table with chips, salsa and softdrink!

Erin's car missing tyres after the tyre slashing incident. Her dad arranged for Dalby Beaurepairs to come and take the tyres and fix them. So the car is awaiting the return of its wheels.

We are probably getting a new housemate on Sunday. One of the new teachers is in unhappy accommodation circumstances... she is allergic to cats and the other teacher she is living with is allergic to cigarette smoke... so they can't remain together in the same house. This lady is about 50ish and very alternate looking, she is the new art teacher in the high school. Apparently she keeps odd bedtimes, smokes, is Irish, eats the food from your fridge and is quite odd. I guess we shall just have to wait and see... nothing works out quite like you expect out here... so anything could happen. Hoping it's not a horrible housemate situation...

Erin and I are getting ready for a big Friday night out in Tara... a movie at home on the laptop. :)

Bits and Pieces from a Wednesday

Erin's tyres got slashed by some lovely person either last night or today. Here is the picture of the poor little car. The police came and took pictures, documenting the crime. Apparently three other cars belonging to school teachers in this area also had their tyres slashed. I'm glad it didn't happen to me!

At school today I began preparing to teach an Indigenous art class with the kids on Friday. I made up the huge poster and drew the outlines of Indigenous animal paintings. I was proud of my work... so here it is:

A real 'service station'!!

So yesterday was a pupil free day at school... staff only. It's kind of annoying to be the teacher and have to attend on student free days! Anyway, school is so much more inviting and less of a hassle without the kids. The day on the whole was quite slow and a little uninteresting. The staff met to talk about National Partnerships and then Behaviour management. I remembered why students want to put their heads down and sleep when the class isn't that exciting. Haha. We had a lovely staff BBQ for lunch though, and I spent some time socialising with the other young teachers. The afternoon was dedicated to planning and I was able to go home free from homework on Monday night.

Today has quite literally been my favourite day on prac. I taught all day and I rarely had to raise my voice!! We talked through some new behaviour management strategies as a class and worked out a way for me to get their attention without having to yell. From then on we had a fun productive day. I actually was able to laugh and joke with the kids today... something I haven't been able to do so far because of the continual behaviour problems. I'm starting to feel like a real teacher, and it feels so good! :)

The kids continue to make me laugh...
Today I was preparing them to head outside for morning tea. The bell had already rung and most of the kids were watching me, waiting for my signal to leave the room. Some however continued to talk. Instead of hushing the talkative ones, I just made eye contact with the waiting kids one at a time and they left the room for lunch. One boy continued to talk flat out, he was facing away from me and didn't seem to notice that kids were gradually disappearing from the room. Finally he and the boy he was talking to were the only ones left. I called his name and he turned to face me and kind of gave a confused look to the rest of the empty room. I asked him if he had noticed the other kids leaving. He hadn't. He gave me such a cute, kind of amused, kind of guilty little look as I pointed out the evils of talking in class... I laughed so much.

I got petrol for the first time out here this afternoon. And guess what?? The lady actually came out of the shop and served me! That is the first time I have ever had a service station do that for me! I was so excited and glad that I didn't have to do it myself! Country people really do know about service. :)

Sunday Lunch

I have just had the best day… a perfect Sunday! I went to the community church in Tara this morning. My class RE teacher is the pastor there and his wife is the school chaplain. One of my students and his family was there too. The service was much more like church at home and the people were absolutely lovely. I was invited to join the Bible study for my time in Tara and met a couple younger women who I might be able to spend some time with out here. The pastor and his wife (John and Daphne) invited me out to their farm for lunch… so I drove 35kms to their property. Wow, their home was so beautiful!

The house was large and so homey with a wood fireplace and a lovely country smell. French doors led out to the back veranda. Daphne took me out there when we arrived and I literally gasped. The veranda was very large with a timber floor and huge mosquito screens all the way around the edge. Kind of like a conservatory I guess, just with screens instead of glass windows. Huge beautiful red lilies were growing in pots around the veranda and they had lounges and tables set up outside; perfect outdoor living. Outside in the yard, big trees shaded the yard and little annual flowers brightened up the garden. Past the house yard you could see the paddocks, some with ripening wheat and some freshly ploughed dirt. A cool breeze was coming through the screens and I felt so at peace. It was amazing! Sometime I don’t think the country out here is very pretty, but if I lived somewhere like this, I would want a house like that!

Anyway, they fed me a lovely country Sunday lunch with sticky date pudding and home made ice-cream for dessert… so good! I talked with Daphne about all sorts of things and I just felt really encouraged spending time with Christian people. We played a board game until mid afternoon and John signed me up to play violin in church for the rest of my time here. As I drove back to Tara from their farm, I couldn’t help but thank God for an awesome day and wonderful new friends!

Sadly I don't have any photos, because I forgot to put the battery back in my camera before I left for church this morning!

Yesterday (Saturday), Erin and I drove into Dalby for a change of scenery and grocery shopping. We wandered around the shops for a while and checked out some of the old buildings in the main part of Dalby. It was so cold that we didn’t want to be outside for too long though! We ate Asian food for lunch (cause you can’t get it in Tara) and then did the groceries and came back.

Super flooded Tara sign and road...

Erin and I eating Asian food in Dalby... I don't look that happy... but... I was...

Amazing old church...

The road was flooded in a couple spots because of all the rain. Pretty awesome… for some reason I love love love driving through the water over the road!

Random Pictures...

The railway crossing in Tara... so cute with the wildflowers along the tracks...

Ringing the church bell in Meandarra...

Me with Jill and Mustafa (the lovely people I met last Sunday)

It's Friday!!!

It's Friday again! The rain is back and the air is cold. I'm not sure that I believe it when people tell me that Tara is hot and dry anymore!
I've been busy with teaching and planning over the last few days. I'm starting to settle into the workload and Joel seems more willing to allow me to take whatever I can manage. I've had some wins and some losses in the last days with the kids. They seem to have good days and bad days.

Yesterday I taught a maths lesson that went down so well I let them out of the detention they had been accumulating all day. At the end of that lesson I felt on top of the world... I didn't have to raise my voice, tell anyone off or get cross. Even better, the kids understood the work and were able to complete their tasks with a high success rate! I was so pleased and they were pretty happy with themselves too! Those great teaching and learning moments get me through all the nonsense that they give me during the rest of the week!

Today didn't go down so well; I had my feet stood on three times by various wild children, sorted out numerous disputes and detentions, dealt with a bird in the classroom, had a mouse run under my feet as I sat at my desk and didn't get a lunch break due to the wet weather. At the end of the day Joel just gave me a kind of amused look and said, "That wasn't very nice was it?" No, it really wasn't. Wet weather brings out little monsters in even the best kids.

The kids give me many reasons to laugh throughout the day though. they do and say some of the most comical things. In Joel's maths lesson this morning, one of the kids was mucking around with his ruler. Joel was so sick of him that he told the boy to put his ruler in the bin. I fought laughter as the kid got up and trudged to the bin and sadly threw away his ruler. It still makes me giggle even now... he looked so forlorn.

Well, in the last two days I received two packages in the mail! Perfect encouragement for difficult days! One from mum with lots of fun things; pictures, photos, curtains and such to decorate my room, and one from Emily with CHOCOLATE!!! YAY!!! I spent yesterday afternoon beautifying my bedroom. While it's not exactly what I would like to have as permenant decoration, it's a whole lot better than bare walls and bedsheet curtains! Thanks so much mum and Emily!!!

My room after decoration... you can't see the full effect very well, but it looks great! :)

 Thanks Emily!!!!! :D

Tomorrow I plan to head into Dalby to shop and get a change of scenery. It's meant to get really cold out here over the weekend, so I might just invest in some more warm clothes!



Green Vomit...

Well, the week is half over. It’s ‘hump day’ according to Erin and the teachers out here. On Wednesday night they have dinner and drinks at the local pub to celebrate making it through half of the week. I haven’t yet attended a ‘hump day’ dinner, but I shall have to make an effort before the end of internship.

Lovely sunset outside of my house... :)

The last two days have gone fairly well. Joel and I have been sharing the teaching load quite equally and I have moved into the teacher’s desk. YAY!! Joel allows me to run the class for the most part and invite him to teach whenever it is his turn. I love being able to manage more of the movement and general housekeeping activities that need to be done in a day. The kids are also starting to respond better to me and I am fighting less for their attention as they realise that I’m serious about consequences for misbehaviour. I enjoy teaching much more when they are attentive!

I had a girl complaining of headaches this morning. She refused to work so I let her put her head on the desk for a while. She still looked a bit off after lunch, but seemed ok. As we sat down to take the afternoon roll, she leaned forward and threw up iridescent green vomit all over the carpet beside me. I don’t think I responded for about 5 seconds. I kind of just stared in horror with no idea what I should do. I called for Joel and he took her out of the room while I shifted the rest of the kids and continued marking the roll. Thankfully we were heading out of the classroom for the afternoon. The smell of vomit combined with the sand stuff that they tip over it to remove it from the carpet is just revolting. I felt sick all afternoon… hopefully whatever bug she has is not catching! Poor kid! That was my excitement for the day.

Last night, Erin and I went over to the other contract teachers’ house to hang out and watch a movie after we finished our planning. The choice of movie wasn’t that great, but it was nice to forget about school for a while and talk and joke around with other adults. They have mouse problems in their house, so I helped them set a rap trap for the mice with peanut butter on it. When we finished the movie, we found all the peanut butter gone and the trap still set and ready to go. Haha. Obviously the little mice aren’t big enough to spring the trap!

Thankfully we don’t have mice in our house, just mozzies and frogs…

A sample of the frogs that dwell en masse around our house...

Chicken and Crushes

My lessons went well today… I taught writing, orchestrated the reading groups and taught SOSE in the afternoon. The kids were chatty like usual and pretty frustrating at times, but Joel seems happy with my lessons and teaching.

Kids are funny. Sometimes when they are difficult to manage the strange things they say make it all worth while. One of my boys said to me today: “Hey Miss, how old are you?” I asked him how old he thought I was and he replied, “Oh, about 40?” I laughed a lot; sometimes they have no idea.

This afternoon during SOSE, I sent one girl to her desk for talking and didn’t pay her any further attention for a while. After the lesson Joel brought me a notebook that he had confiscated from her during the lesson. In it she had set out each page with a different heading. Some of these were: the ‘cool’ page, the ‘stupid’ page, the ‘boys I have a crush on’ page, and a poem for a dumped boy. Again, I could only laugh. I’m not sure how I will deal with the notebook at school in the morning though.

After school Erin and I decided to make baked chicken for dinner. We had put the chicken in the fridge to thaw during the day, but it was still frozen. So we put it in a container and carried it down the street to the house of the other contract teachers to defrost in the microwave. They weren’t home yet when we arrived, so Erin and I wandered further down the street for a while with the chicken. When we returned they were back and, as we thawed the chicken, they told us about their resident mice and the rough day they had had in the high school. I’m glad I only have to deal with the little kids! We left their house, having borrowed another dish and went back down the street bearing the thawed chicken before us. I laughed and laughed as people drove past with high school students in their cars. I can just imagine the questions tomorrow for Erin in the high school: “Hey Miss, was that chicken you were carrying down the street yesterday afternoon?”

I won’t know what to do when I move back to civilisation and have proper cooking facilities again! Never a dull moment in Tara! J

Meandarra Adventure

So today was Sunday. I decided to attend church. In Tara there are 3 churches; a Catholic church, a Community (AOG) church and an Anglican church. I turned up at the Anglican Church at 8:30am as advertised on the sign out the front. I walked in to find that the service was almost over. I snuck into the back pew and was excitedly greeted by the congregation after the service. They informed me that when a priest is visiting (as he was this weekend), they have the service at 7:30am instead. There were only about 15 people there… sad really that so few in Tara go to church… but maybe they attend the other two churches. They took me off to the church hall and fed me morning tea at 9:00am.

I was invited to go with them to another town further west for the church service there, and seeing as I only made it for the last 5 mins of the one in Tara, I agreed to go along. I rode with a lovely couple, Jill and Mustafa, in their car to Meandarra. It was about a 45min drive along long straight roads. There has been so much rain here that water is just sitting in the paddocks and ditches and in the fields among the wheat. We drove through two flooded parts of road, my excitement for the day, and passed paddocks full of sheep with lambs and paddocks full of prickly pears and salt bush. The wildflowers in the fields are so lovely at the moment; purple, blue and yellow.

Driving through the flooded roads...

Meandarra was even smaller than Tara. Church was an interesting experience for me, having never attended a traditional type Anglican service, but I enjoyed being with Christian people again. After church the Meandarra ladies fed us lunch. We tried to drop into the Meandarra ANZAC Memorial Museum to take a look, but it had a $5 admission fee. I took pictures through the front door. J Jill and Mustafa dropped me back in Tara around 1:30pm.

When I got home from my church expedition, I found Erin hanging her bed sheets in the bathroom over the shower curtain rail. She was drying them with the help of the bathroom heater and fan. I laughed. J

It started raining again in the afternoon, so I sat down and planned the start of my week at school. Right now I’m ready for a good long sleep before I start on internship week 2!

Week 1 Summarised!

The first week of school went really quickly. I had no teaching responsibilities on Monday, but I started with half days on Tuesday. The kids were very impressed that I almost had all of their names down by the end of day 1. On Tuesday I taught an English lesson on recounts and had my first lot of marking to do. Some of the holiday recounts were pretty graphic… one child described how he had gone pigging and the dogs had ripped apart one of the pigs. Country kids are funny.

I taught money maths and Indigenous studies for the rest of the week. Some days were better than others. The kids are very talkative and earned several detentions for their bad manners. It’s strange to be completely in charge of classroom discipline. On my previous pracs, my supervising teacher would step in and help with classroom management. Joel (my mentor teacher) lets me manage on my own. It’s a great experience, but sometimes difficult. Sometimes I find it hard to think of appropriate consequences for misbehaviour.  

My teaching space is pretty well resourced for a little country school. I have an interactive whiteboard and data projector, a whiteboard, a blackboard and a DVD/VCR player. The kids are seated in rows facing the whiteboard; we’ve already moved two of them since Monday for talking and distracting others. One huge downside of my classroom is that it is a shared teaching space. The 3/4 teacher shares our room and is only separated from us by a few bookshelves. When I am teaching, I can hear her and her kids talking. I think my kids figure that I won’t notice them talking when the class over the bookshelf is noisy!

My classroom!

The school day is broken up into four 70 minute periods. On a normal day we have Writing, Reading Groups, Maths and then some sort of SOSE/Science/Arts/PE lesson in the afternoon. My area of special responsibility during the internship is the SOSE unit. I have written the work program and the assessment, and will be in charge of writing their final SOSE reports.

On Thursday afternoon the weather changed from hot and dry to stormy. It rained all day Friday so we were stuck inside with the kids for wet weather lunches. L Cooped up kids get pretty silly… it was nice to send them home at the end of the day. Friday evening it rained so heavily and steadily that Erin (the other prac student living with me) and I joked that our house would float away in the night. When I woke up this morning the school oval (which can be seen from our house) had a series of lakes across it and the ditches by the side of the roads were flowing with water. Apparently when it rains out here, the roads flood between Tara and Dalby because the creeks run so rarely that they don’t build the bridges high enough.

Flooding in the drains and on the school oval.

There are little lakes of water sitting under the house now from the rain yesterday… perfect breeding grounds for the mozzies. Now the mozzies out here are really really bad! Not only are they the size of fat black flies, but they come in swarms the minute you set foot outside. I learned very quickly that if you are going to wear short sleeves/pants, then you must also wear enough insect repellent to keep a small army at bay. The mozzies bites that I got during my first couple days didn’t stop itching until yesterday.

Well, our house has a little more furniture now than when we first arrived. We now have a big screen TV sitting on the living room floor, a bookshelf and a set of scary old couches. Sadly no table and chairs yet… I’ll keep you posted. The TV was the first item of furniture to arrive. Apparently they thought it was the most important. It attracts many little black bugs at night and we wake up to find them all dead on the floor the next morning. We watch the Commonwealth games in the evenings… go Australia. The couches arrived on Tuesday while we were at school. They are ok… but they look like someone set their cat loose on them… they are pretty shredded up in parts. The bookshelf was a donation from a couple other young teachers out here for a 10 week contract. They took pity on our furniture-less state and pushed the bookshelf down the street to our house on the back of a skateboard one evening. So here we are, all set up in our house at

64 Binnie St

.

64 Binnie St... feel free to send stuff!!! :D

My room... complete with bedsheet curtains...

This morning we did a round of the shops in the main street. The lady in the discount store is the mother of Erin’s supervising teacher, and the kids working in the news agent and the Foodworks are high school students from school. The people are very friendly here though, I love it!

Me at the school.

The main street in Tara.

I should get down to planning for my Saturday afternoon. I’ll be teaching a lot more this week… working my way up to a full teaching load by the end of week 3.

More to come… J

The welcome sign at the edge of Tara. Takes about 2 mins to drive from one side of Tara to the other. :)

First days...

We arrived on Saturday afternoon at about 5:30pm in cute little Tara. From the welcome to Tara sign, all you can see is the water tower and some grain silos in the distance. We parked in the main street (with its 10 or so shops) and tried to call the lady who was arranging our accommodation. After no answer for the first half hour, we sat down in the local bar to wait and drink lemonade. Finally she called and told us to go to the Tara Hotel Motel (the Hoey Moey according to the kids) for the night because our house wasn’t furnished yet. The Hotel Motel definitely wasn’t 5 star, but it was ok for a night… better than an unfurnished house anyway.

On Sunday I went to the Grieger family get-together, which was coincidentally only half an hour from Tara. An encouraging family member told me that the kids in the next town to Tara had burned their school down only earlier this year. When I got back to Tara on Sunday afternoon, we had a house with beds, an oven, a fridge and a washing machine. It’s quite a nice house and conveniently located at the end of the same street as the school. Our lack of furniture was entertaining on Sunday night as we sat preparing for school on the furniture-less living room floor.

School began on Monday with parade. I’m sorry to say that the lack of music education in the primary school was painfully obvious as the kids sang the national anthem.

My kids are super cute… all 23 of them. They talk too much and don’t listen as well as I would like, but I can’t help but love them!

Tara Shire State College

Internship is finally here and I find myself in Tara. Tara is a tiny little town somewhere west of Dalby. Not many people live here, and those that do seem quite interesting.
Tara Shire State College is a little P-12 school with about 400 kids. I'm teaching 23 grade 4's. :) More to come...