Christmas Holidays are Nearly Here!

Almost Christmas time. I can't believe how fast the first half of this academic year has gone. Just amazing. We have 2 more days at school. Well, it's really 1.5 days because we finish at 12 on Friday. Then we have buses to take us into town to a place on Singapore River for our Christmas do. Quite looking forward to that:)

Term 1 felt kind of short. Teachers were at school for most of 10 weeks but the students were there for 8 weeks. We had quite a few new teachers starting this year and there was a nice positive vibe about the place. This was a good thing because there was a little bit of negativity at the end of last year. In general the negative have people moved on.

We went to Japan for the first term holidays. It was the first time we had gone back to Japan since we left 9 years ago. Mel & I were both really excited to be going back. We had a good time visiting the places we used to hang out although some places had closed down. The place I took Mel for dinner on our first date had moved and was difficult to find. We were really disappointed to find it only to find out that it had closed in April. We didn't do lots of sight seeing but we did manage to catch up with lots of people which was really cool. Tilda loved playing with the other kids. It was interesting to note that we (the parents) didn't really seem to have changed much. But the kids had grown up lots! We did quite a bit of shopping for things that we can't get outside of Japan. I also bought new lens for my camera which was very exciting for me:)

Kobe from the Ropeway

Nunobiki Waterfall

Tilda loved the ropeway!

Funky roof at Sorakuen Gardens

Term 2 has absolutely whizzed by! Which is both good and bad. It means that the holidays are here already. But it also means that the last 2 or 3 weeks have been crazy busy with all kinds of things to tidy up before Christmas. One of those things was our first Days of Nexellence event. This is a day when we take all our Year 7-9 students off timetable and give them are series of activities to complete related to a central theme. Our theme for this event was a murder mystery.

Although it was a lot to organise, it was worth it because it was an awesome day! The kids loved it. There was a really positive feeling all day. It was great to see the "too cool for school" kids get dragged into participating in the activities by the others. Our school is a Mac 1:1 school so ICT is a big thing for us. The whole event was based around digital technology. It was cool but the online activity was massive to the point where our server was starting to become overloaded. We had live stream TV to broadcast breaking news and to share information with students, clues hidden in a Minecraft world and we used a Twitter hashtag (#daysofnexus) to share information vis Twitter. Several of us were tweeting solidly all day and just as we were finishing up, #daysofnexus was one of the top 10 trending topics on Twitter in Singapore which was really cool. And as of 9:30ish tonight, it was still in the top 10:)

We are heading back to NZ for Christmas on Sunday night. Mel is looking forward to being able to drink wine at a decent price and Tilda is really excited about seeing the animals and Granddad's digger on the farm. I'm looking forward to chilling out and not thinking about school for a while:)

Well nothing much else to say so I'll be off. Merry Christmas and all the best for 2014!

Four months in Singapore

Yesterday marked four months since we arrived in Singapore. Mel and I were talking this morning that it seems like ages ago that we got here. But it at the same time it feels like the time has whizzed by.

I think the biggest change has been in Matilda. She is nearly 18 months old now and is definitely not a baby anymore. She seems to be learning new words everyday and is starting to make short sentences regularly. The other day she said "I don't like it" when she was offered some food and she regularly says "I need this" when she wants something.

Walking has become important too. When we head down to a local cafe for brunch Matilda insists on walking as much as possible. It's roughly a kilometre to the cafe and she walks about halfway without too many problems. She took a tumble this morning though and scraped her knees and fingers. While we were eating she kept holding up her hand with a pained look on her face. Poor poppet:(

We seem to have more public holidays here which is nice. They try cater for all the main ethnic groups so we had a day off last month for the end of the Hajj for the Muslims. This Tuesday is a holiday for Deepvali which is a Hindu festival. We get Christmas and New Year as well. Actually we get two New Year holidays because there's 2 days off in February for Chinese New Year.  There are some others as well but I can't remember the details.

Mel and I went into town last night for dinner and to see the Deepvali lights in Little India. The bus was absolutely full! To the point where we were not stopping. I reckon we missed a third of the stops. We had dinner at a really nice Indian restaurant and then wandered around a bit. There were loads of people around and the lights looked pretty cool. The bus trip home wasn't as busy:)

School is ok. We have an inspection for our EduTrust certification. The school needs this to be allowed to take international students. Without this we would have to shut up shop. As you can imagine this is causing quite a bit of stress. Although they aren't actually interested in our teaching practice they want to interview some of the teaching staff, as well as the admin guys. Everyone was worried on Friday as that was when we would find out if we would be the "lucky ones". Thankfully I missed out but Mel is gutted because they asked to interview some of the part time staff. She's only been there a month! They also want to see another of the part timers. She only started on Monday and has had a fairly stressful start to her job!

I can't think of anything to say right now so I'll be off.

Later
TONE