In the Opening Program Sunday morning each teacher introduced him/herself to all of our Chinese students and then all of the American teachers recited "You can build a wall or you can build a bridge..." with motions and then we sang "You've Got a Friend in Me" with help from a CD playing the song loudly in the background! The Chinese officials and Dale gave speeches and then the Chinese teaching assistants introduced themselves and sang a song. It was a good program in a beautiful auditorium:)

Many teachers volunteered to give the English language assessments and they had the joy of working in the air-conditioned classrooms while the runners who brought the children to the clasrooms where testing was taking place sweated it out in the hallways of the large classroom building. The runners included MJ, Javan, Michael, Peyton, Lane and Andy and they did a great job!

Classes began in the afternoon (Sunday) and it was wonderful to see all of our teachers working so hard to befriend their Chinese students and engage them in learning! Bonnie, with all of her experience and enthusiasm, (she says she is chronologically gifted because of her age) is amazing! Our young teachers and new teachers were giving their teaching 100% effort and we are very proud of them! The students are a little younger (lots of 10-12 year olds) and more are at the beginner level so we are adjusting our lessons for this, but we also have many older students who are quite advanced who are in Doug's class.

Last night's activity was UNO cards and games in the classrooms. Tonight (Monday night) we will all go to the classrooms to work on a special craft project - sewing a design on the front cover of autograph books. This afternoon we run the activities schedule with 9 groups running at different locations on campus at the same time so think of us then!

Dale wants all of you to know that you can see our school's campus if you load Google Earth, in the "Fly to" box on the left type 31 17 02, 121 36 56 and then hit Enter you will see The Golden Apple International School, blue box is roof of cafeteria where we eat, zoom in and look for a camera, click on camera and you will see photo of classroom building with Debbie's arts and crafts room on the corner of the second floor! As you look at the entire campus the soccer field is on the right and our dorm where most of our rooms are on the 15th floor has a white roof.

Already students and Chinese teachers are approaching us to hold many interesting conversations. Joe especially enjoyed speaking with the parents of one student during registration. Thank you for your support - it is quite hot and humid and we are all recovering from jet lag and our schedule is jam-packed so we need you to lift us up:)