Listowel & Week 7

This past weekend I decided to take a rest from all of the traveling that I have been doing. I do not sit to breathe over here with having family visiting, teaching, and traveling. Ang came to visit me this weekend....which was great. We did some shopping because that seems to be a stress of hers as well.


This weekend I finally had a chance to take some pictures and see a bit of Listowel. Yes, that is the city I am living in and you would think that I would have lots of pictures of it already. I haven't really had time though, and usually it is raining so the pictures wouldn't have turn out anyways.

Here is a picture of the street right off my road. This is the main road in Listowel. It looks so normal to me now, but this picture definitely was not taken in America. Notice those stone walls that everywhere (the ones here are yellow).



Here is the same street further down. It leads into the city square. All of the restaurants and shops that are on this street are right next to one another, and all are connected. There also Christmas lights hung up all through the town. You can see strings of them going back and forth.

The picture on the left is the square or city center in Listowel. I love the different colored buildings everywhere. And the church, St. John's, is located right in the center of the square. My town is very small, only about 3000 people. We do have 99 pubs though, which is quite impressive. Many of the small towns in Ireland look the same. So these pictures would be typical of many smaller Irish towns.

Here is Listowel castle. Unfortunately I do not know much about it, and was not able to climb it or go in it. It's located right along the river. I will do some research with my family and find the significance of it!

School of course was extremely busy this week! All of the classes are preparing for their Christmas concerts. Rather than having a school wide one that is done on one night, each grade prepares their own separate concert. They choose a day close to Christmas to perform it. Parents can then come in during the day to wach their children.

I am working with 1st class on their concert. It is a bit stressful because the girls have a hard time standing/sitting still for us to practice and there is pressure because parents will becomming in to watch. The two first class teachers and myself have been planning it for a couple of weeks and now are working with the girls. It's called 'The Sleepy Shepard'. It's a very cute play and the song selections for the play are great. The girls know all of the songs because we have been practicing them for about 4 weeks. They learned them from me, so we will see how well they do. My singing is so awful. It is torture getting infront of 6 year olds to sing...it really is!

Here are the girls at our first dress rehearsal. The costumes that they have the girls wear are hilarious. They are older ones and they are used with every play they do. They just try to make them appear as though they fit the part the girls are playing. The girl who is Mary has the most ridicilious costume. I helped her get ready, and I couldn't stop laughing. I would show you, but I don't think that would be right. She has a big lacy bow that goes around her head. I can tell that she feels very uncomfortable with it. At least the other girls haven't laughed at her or really seem to notice.

My fourth class started painting their planets. I know it seems like I have been working with them on the Solar System forever, but I am only in their classroom 3 times a week for about 40 minutes. You can't really accomplish that much in such a short period of time. The planets are actually turning out a lot better than I am imagined. They are so precise with how they paint it and try to make it look exactly like the pictures that they printed off. We still are trying to figure out how we are going to add rings to them. I am sure that one of them will come up with something. This week half the girls painted and the other half worked on making a poster to show off their reserach that I had them find. Apparently they just LOVE doing posters and projects.

As you can tell, the planets are turning out great!

I also enjoyed some time with my 4th grade girls at their break. This was the only nice day for the past like 10 days. When I say 'nice' I mean not pouring rain and ridicilious winds that blow you everywhere. So I felt that I should show off some of my jumping moves. They were quite impressed!

On Tuesday the Junior Infants teacher was not in. She asked me on Monday if I would take over her class for the day on Tuesday. She would rather have the girls with someone they knew then to ship them off two by two to different classes. The principal said it was fine. I was so excited to be on my own in the room and kind of pretend like it was my own class. I had such a great time with them, they are so adorable. They behaved really well, which is good because noone came to check on me once. It is so weird that they just completely trust an American girl who has been there for 7 weeks with 4 year olds. Regardless I loved it!

We talked a lot about Advent with the Junior Infants. I read them a book called the Manger everyday this week, while we had our Advent wreath lit. They loved it and were so into the book each time that we read it. We also practiced writing some sentences dealing with Advent and drew some wonderful pictures throughout the course of the week.

1st class girls impressing me with their Irish dancing skills. Unfortunately there wasn't a camera around while they were trying to teach me :)