The First First Day of Summer Camp.

and so started the first day of class at neli elementary school.

here are the teaching assignments at neli elementary:

bernard & karen: 3rd grade

joshua & elean: 3rd grade

norman & marissa: 3rd + 4th grade

chris & esther: 4th grade

shing & si: 5th grade

the team member's thoughts/photographs on the first day of class:

bernard & karen:

Bernard Wen: First day of class! ...was tiring, but very bearable. Our class was pretty quiet at first, but at the end they were pretty rowdy and amicable. As expected, we have a few who don't talk much, a few who talk too much, some who are really smart, some who can barely spell. But nonetheless, teaching is going well, especially since we have a Taiwanese seminary student helping us and PJosh for the day. Karen Ai: Today turned out a lot better than i expected. Coming back to Taiwan for STM a second time i kept thinking about how my first day last year was terrible....which made me scared and nervous . I woke up at 5am today nervous about class-_- .Because i didn't know what to expect, i kept replaying how it was like last year. But wow did the day pass! The kids became more open to us teachers and followed us around. They were all so willing to come up to the board and answer questions which made the day more enjoyable to know that they wanted to be involved. It's amazing to see how quickly the kids warmed up to us. Teaching the youngest class, all the kids are adorable and every time i looked at them, they gave me some of the biggest smiles. Now i look forward to getting to know the kids more in the coming days which i know will pass by quickly. I need to remember not to rely on my own strength and knowledge but to rely on God's.....and to not give up so easily when things are not going the way i want it to, but to trust that God is in control. I'm excited to see what God has in plan for this week and the upcoming weeks. All the team members are suffering from bug bites, lack of sleep, and the non stop sweating, but it's encouraging to see how everyone puts all those distractions aside, like they forgot them. During down time, we all sit around sharing about our day and our kids. This is my favorite time of the day. Through our laughters we grow closer together. Thanks for the support and the prayers! We definitely need it! joshua & elean: joshua yen: day one was cool. Elean Yang: Elean: Day 1 went really well ^_^ beforehand, even though I KNEW that this is a different mission trip with different people and different kids, all I could see when I imagined the first day was what it was like last year. The first day gave me a better picture of what the next week will be like and helped me feel the difference between the two trips. The kids were really easy to get along with, smart, creative, and pretty well behaved. Our helper, Angela, is really good at controlling the kids and keeping both them and us informed of what is going on. Even though sometimes I feel like it's hard to communicate with the kids, I know God will help us get the most important message through to them so I'll just try my best and trust God to do the rest~ norman & marissa: Marissa Liu: Today was our first day teaching the students at Nei Li. Norman and I have 16 students with grade levels ranging from third to fourth grade. When we arrived at the school today and started to meet our students, everything felt so slow. They were quiet and not as involved, but right before they had lunch everything started to pick up. The students started getting interested and participated by answering questions and reading loudly back to us. God has blessed us with an amazing helper name Jin Ling who is always willing to help. :). God has also blessed me with an amazing and experienced partner, Norman. There is so much to be thankful for today but I don't want to take up this whole blog. Overall, I would have to say today went well and I can't wait till tomorrow. Our prayer request is for the student's parents to allow me and Norman to visit them and share a little bit about what we are doing. norman ai: as everyone has been saying, today started off rather slow, which is normal since it was the first time we met the kids and it took a while for them to get to know us. by lunch time, we were already starting to make the connection with them. the afternoon sessions went much better. the kids are much smarter than i expected, so we had to slightly improvise and add on to our lesson plans, but praise God it went smoothly. im very glad to have marissa as a teaching partner this week. she took the initiative and started to talk to the kids during the lessons to make sure they werent getting lost or falling behind. it definitely started to break the ice between us and the students. our teaching assistant, jin ling, a seminary student here in taiwan, also was a great addition to our teaching staff. she is so energetic and interacts with the students intuitively. my prayer thanks would go to God preparing the way for us and giving us a smooth first day of camp. my prayer request would be that God allows the hearts of our student's parents to open and allow us to come do house visitations during the evenings. thanks! chris & esther: esther wong: the kids love chris' drawings. one kid copied his drawing style when we told them to draw their family. they are also very impressed with how big chris is. they know more english than we thought, so went through our lesson more quickly than we expected. chris sung: the day started somewhat slowly and it took a bit of time for the kids to finally start to warm up to us. the teaching went more smoothly than we anticipated since we have been quite anxious, so praise God. i ask that you pray for us to continue to have confidence and really get to know the kids shing & si: today was our first day teaching! one word sums up our experience: hot. it was quite exhausting teaching in the heat and our students were getting worn down from the heat as well. despite the temperature, the language/cultural barriers, everything went off without a hitch. the lesson plans went very well and the students enjoyed the crafts and games. the kids were a lot of fun (actually they had too much fun chasing shing around and being incoming 6th graders, were a bit squirrelly in many different aspects) and were seemingly receptive to the ideas we were convey to them. now off to shower off and have a little break before we make a home visit tonight. keep praying for us as we can see it will be quite tiring, and rewarding, experience. ***addition shing just got back from our first home visit a few minutes ago. i was not sure what to really expect, neither did any of my teaching partners, as none of us had ever gone on a home visit for stm. but however, we had a wonderful time talking with our student's family. there was some initial hesitation from the family at first, but they really opened up to us after we described what we are here in taiwan for- including spending long hours of our summer and thousands of dollars to be with these kids without pay. i'm not sure what else took place as the conversation took place in taiwanese (other than me apparently looking really young xP), which only our teaching assistants had a grasp on. i really do see God at work already after this conversation and hope we all can keep praying for the hearts of those that we will encounter as well as for more opportunities to converse with new people.