What a busy day it was yesterday - we just keep going and going! :-) I spent the day at school again volunteering in Louise's class and I did assessment all day again as well and was able to finish everything she wanted me to do except for two children doing one assessment which will take me 5 minutes next time I am in. She was so appreciative again and I am starting to feel like I am being 'accepted' - she is beginning to treat me like a teacher which is great - it's not the same as it was working with Bronwyn, but it's better than it was before, so I am happy about that.
Dad spent another day driving around town to check out another one of his areas for the census. It's taking him about six hours to do this - long hours just driving around and around an area. He says that driving up a side (non-busy) street works okay as he can look at the houses on both sides of the street at the same time. But, on a busy street, he has to go up one side and down the other because there are just too many things to check and no way to stop or pull off while he does that. It's going to be a busy couple of weeks having to check out all these places. The numbers in this area at least were pretty much right on, so there's nothing to worry about there.
As soon as Dad picked me up from school, we headed over to Pialba State School to speak with the couple whose class I supply taught in today. It's a grade four class and a husband and wife team teach in the classroom which is double the regular classroom size - they have desks on either side of the classroom with a carpeted area in the middle where they can give the class instructions and do some teaching to the students. David and Maree (pronounced just like 'Marie') were great and so easy to talk with. David is attending a two days sports tournament and so I am supplying for him. Maree said they were so pleased when they heard that I was coming in to supply as they are doing a unit called "Around the World in 40 Days" and one of the countries they were going to touch on was Canada. Maree asked me if I would be willing to talk to the students about living in Canada and I said that I would be happy to do that.
We had to hurry from there to get home to make our dinner so that we could be ready to go to the Family History Centre. The High Priests are going to be in charge of being at the FHC on Wednesday nights so that any members who want to do their family history and can't come during the days, can come at night. Our friend, Geoff signed up to do it with Dad this week. Robyn came with Geoff and so while Dad showed Geoff how to use the programs available at the FHC, Robyn and I chatted a bit and then she watched me try to find my great great grandmother on my Grandpa Terry's side. I am looking for the name 'Maria Dermott' and I have been told by Uncle Rick that she was born sometime around 1861 + or -. I have found two Maria's so far who fit the bill - one born in 1856 and one born in 1860. I still have some searching to do - then I will have to do some more to find out if I can find info on my great grandparents - it's a bit of a round about way of finding them, but it's the way I seem to have to go right now. It takes ages to find someone, but when I do, I just get so excited about finding out more about my roots. :-)
Today, I went into the grade four class and it turned out to be a really good day. I'm not fussed on teaching any grade above three, but working with Maree made it go really well. We worked mostly out of books today - spelling, math, reading, and also did art and geography. I talked with the kids about Canada for an hour and they were very focussed (except for when we gave them atlases so that I could talk about the provinces and they went 'crazy' looking at the atlases - they really should have had ten minutes to just check them out before I tried to talk with them about Canada). We talked about where it was compared to Australia, how long it takes to fly there, seasons (including the leaves changing colours and falling to make us call our autumn 'fall'), the flag, maple syrup, weather, temperatures, snow, the provinces, geographical make-up, resources, language, and of course hockey (although they call it 'ice hockey' here :-) and the best hockey team in the league: the mighty Toronto Maple Leafs! :-) I couldn't believe how fast the time went - I took some coins in to show them and we will do that tomorrow. I asked Maree if the presentation was okay and she said it was great, so I was very pleased.
Robyn picked me up after school as Pialba State School is right near her house and we were going visiting teaching at 5pm. This worked really well because it meant that Dad didn't have to stop what he was doing to pick me up from school, take me home and then take me to our first visiting teaching stop. It was nice visiting with Robyn and Geoff - it really is good having times like these to get to know our friends even better. Our first visit was to our Relief Society president, Cherylyn, and then we visited with Rosalea. It was another lovely visiting time with friends. Our message this month was taken from one of the talks given at the April General Conference. It was titled "LDS Women are Incredible' and it esteemed the great worth women of the church are. It was a beautiful reminder of all the wonderful things women do and are. Both Cherylyn and Rosalea appreciated the message we gave.
Dad did Meals on Wheels today, but had to do it with a different partner since I wasn't able to go. He worked with Margie today and they had to do two routes - one driver wasn't able to come and I wasn't able to come, so that meant that one route wasn't covered, so Avis (the boss extraordinaire) had to create one route out of two routes. That meant that Dad didn't get out until 11am and didn't finish until 1pm. He spent the afternoon mowing the lawn and then began working on his next area which he will finish up tomorrow. Tonight was SES night and they spent the whole night learning how an emergency operation centre (command centre) works: who the people working in it are and what each person does. The SES members could be asked to do one of those jobs or help a person do one of those jobs during an emergency. An EOC is run like a big company - they have an incident commander at the top who oversees the whole operation and then has an operations officer, a planning officer and a logistics officer who all work under the incident commander. Dad said it was really interesting learning about this.
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