Week 8

“Teachar Teachar!! I’m gonna Pou Pou on your face!!”-Zizoula

This sentence pretty much sums up Week 8 for you. Pou Pou meaning poo poo or poop. Week 8 was absolutely INSANE at the crèche. I speculate that this is for a few reason that all stem from one thing. Here’s the deal.. In South Africa kids go to school year round. It’s unlike the States where kids get a 3 month break smack dab in the middle of the year. They go ALL year. Except for a few breaks they get in between Trimesters. The first of the breaks happens to be right now. The first Trimesters just ended and now all the school children are out for what is called Easter Break. It last 2 whole weeks! Crazy long right? Right! Now this doesn’t really affect my little ones because they aren’t in school. The crèche does not take a break at any point in the year except for public holidays and such. But still these kids are still affected. Easter Break is the cause of all problems at the crèche this week. The kids suddenly are on no schedule whatsoever. Not that they are usually on a schedule, it’s just suddenly 100x worse than before. I’ve never seen such tired, cranky little ones in my entire life. It’s so obvious that their life schedules have been extremely messed up and now they are paying for it and the worse thing is that they can’t do anything about it. Poor little things… There’s nothing quite like a little 2 year old having a melt down and then them yelling that they are going to “Pou Pou” on your face. Haha Also it seems that the teachers also want to be on Easter break, which leaves us volunteers with a lot of work and responsibility. We have continued to work on our kicking skills and we learned a new song about Bananas, which I may or may not regret teaching them seeing as how they now yell “BANANAS BANANAS” every time they sit in a circle. One really fun activity we did was we just took a giant roll of butcher paper and laid it on the floor and had all the kids sit around it. Then we dumped out all the crayons and let them go at it. I also took coins out and put them under the paper and colored over them, leaving an imprint on the paper that looked just like the coins. The kids seemed to think that was super funny.. Next week WILL go smoother. I want to take cherrios in for stringing and Egg shaped sugar cookies for Easter!