Is what probably every teacher answers, when you ask how they are at the end of a school year. Which is why it has been a while since my last story here, but I also figured my Irish adventures last month make up for the temporary silence. Anyway, I’m still here and I’ve been up to this:
As you could’ve seen from my Twitter page, the last school week was filled with trips, games and music. I also observed a few children working with the science boxes I created, which was fun to do. They worked in twos and I remember one boy of a couple who kept saying he already knew so much. But then the other boy started an experiment, which left them both surprised: “Huh, how can that be?” Afterwards I asked them to judge the boxes. I’ve had answers of 13 kids on the question: “How much fun do you think it was?” They could choose a number between 0 and 10, of which 0 meant ‘no fun at all’ and 10 of course ‘the best’. The average was 9.6! They also gave points for how easy (0) or difficult (10) they thought it was and the average of again 13 answers was 4.8! Needless to say I’m satisfied about my work.
With the younger kids we went to a small amusement park, where I was last when I was a kid and which involved a train trip just as exciting as the rest of the day. We also went for a picnic in a park, where we saw this beautiful animal. On our way back, one of the little girls held a twig behind her head, pretending to be Bambi.
The oldest kids had their own sort-of-graduating-ceremony on the last Thursday evening of this year, for which they had to perform a Goodbye song. They already had a song – a Dutch one for kids who leave their primary school – which is a tradition at this school. None of the teachers read music though and they could only practice the song with a recording on a cassette (yes, they still exist!) and that’s where I came in as their music teacher. The teachers would rather have a recording of the song in a bit lower key and with an intro though. Which is where my musical friend Marcel came in. With his recording facilities we created a few versions of the song, complete with a karaoke one. The performance went well and here’s (on request) a little piece of the track:
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Music: Gerard van Amstel. Lyrics: Gerard van Midden. Recording and mix: Hanny van Arkel and Marcel Graus. Drums, electric guitar and bass: Marcel Graus. Acoustic guitar and vocals: Hanny van Arkel.
I also wanted to share a picture of four young chickens. Remember them? I kind of adopted them when they were still eggs and as you can see, they are doing very well in the garden of one of my colleagues. He recently e-mailed this picture to everyone in our school, so the kids could see how much they have grown.
And ‘last but not least’, I’ve also had a personal life in between. Some of that time was spend on this project: a new wardrobe. I had a simple dark blue thing before this one, which grew into almost falling over. So, I bought a nice wooden one, opened the package when I arrived home and found out they gave me the lighter version. So, I dragged the wood back to the store to find out I had only seen the inside of the closet (sigh). “It happens all the time” said the salesman, leaving me with the question why they don’t inform you of that right away then. Anyway, my mum and I had much fun putting the pieces together and I’m very happy with how it looks now.
3 Comments
Busy indeed and I love the song, congratulations to the performers and producers
Nice Hanny! I love the la-la lyrics…must get you to write me a song one day!
Heh, thanks Weez!
Is that because that’s the only part you understand of this Dutch song? 
I didn’t write this though, but I shall practice my songwriting skills. 