September and Autumn

Autumn is my absolute favorite season of the year. I love the crispness of the air and the leaves, I love pumpkin, cinnamon, chai flavors of anything. I love wearing long sleeves and the wind blowing. Hay rides and pumpkin carving and campfires just make me smile.

But alas. I live in southern China. In my attempt to bring a mid-west Autumn to my classroom, I decorate the windows with colored leaves and read them books about squirrels and scarecrows and pumpkins. We talk about the seasons changing, but it's still not the same. Today I had a laughable moment with a student who has always lived in more southern parts of Asia.

We were reading a book simply called "Fall", and it's about the different colors things change when it's Fall. At one point, it was talking about how frost makes things look white. I asked her what she thought 'frost' meant, and she wasn't sure. When I told her to use the picture (which had snowflakes) as a clue, she stared, and thought, and looked, and said, "I don't know what that is!"

My poor children, who live in such a climate that falling leaves and snow are foreign concepts.

Another laughable moment of the day was when one of my students wrote the date today. He wrote: 9-1=8...whoops. I guess I've hammered math facts into him a bit too much.

Last one for the day (my kids made me smile a lot today). In Bible class, we were talking about Cain & Abel and why Abel's sacrifice was acceptable. I asked if anyone knew why we don't have to make sacrifices anymore, and many of them had ideas. My favorite one was "Because it's GROSS!" We all giggled for a while at that one, and then one of the others raised her hand with the right answer--because Jesus died. Praise the Lord for our Lamb of God!