Back to School--and full of surprises too

I have felt the pressure to really see the children do well this term and also see to the spiritual positions of our staff as well. Because of that, I wanted to really start the term off well with a well-planned out approach to the term. I wanted to make sure that everyone completed the curriculum and really taught what needed to be taught throughout the term.

Monday, the teacher's came back and we all sat down to plan out our term. It was a pretty successful day, though I was nervous about some the conversations I was going to have with my staff. I came to find out that one of my teachers had accepted another position during the break and didn't inform me that he was even interviewing. He was going to be unavailable two days a week until almost the end of the term.

When I talked to Stacy and John about it, we decided that it would be in the best interests of the children to have our teacher decide one job or the other. He chose to go with the other job, leaving us teacherless. It put us in a very frustrating position, trying to find another teacher for the coming weeks.

With the stress of the first day of school looming at me, a missing teacher, and some curriculum gone bad(Rosemary's curriculum is all on the computer and it is currently NOT WORKING), I was more than a little nervous about returning to school.

Today, went very well though, considering all that happened. The kids, for the most part, were ready for school to start back up again and we didn't have hardly any behavior problems. Stacy took one class of kids, while Letitia took her own class. Everything went pretty smoothly.

I also had a fun lesson on the skeletal system and the kids got really into it, asking all kinds of questions about bones. So many questions, in fact, that we didn't even get to do our art lesson today. Whoopsie!

This afternoon, I was able to get a lot of work done, answering emails, getting my school's website info off to our web designer, and more. John, Stacy, and I also met with a girl from town who will be a teacher's aid, helping in the classrooms and occasionally taking over a class when a teacher is absent. Thank goodness for friendships in the village, huh?

Overall, even though we had a little surprise in our staffing, I feel like God's hand was in it and am looking forward to the term ahead.