This one goes out to my mom

Two weeks ago was one of the biggest holidays for Thai people, the queen’s birthday a.k.a mother’s day. Now we have mother’s day in the states, and in my family that means making breakfast for my mom in bed and getting together later in the day with aunts, uncles, cousins, grandparents for a barbecue. Fun, cute, and an excuse to see the family.

Me with some of the Thai teachers in the English Department

In Thailand, they take mother’s day to a whole new level…. they really celebrate mothers. The queen’s birthday was on a Friday (school was off so we celebrated at school on Thursday). In Thailand every day of the week is a different color, and Friday is blue so for the celebration all the Thai teachers came to school donned in their blue beautiful Thai silk outfits.

The girls all dressed up for Thai dancing

Me with my M-2/1 students and the homeroom teacher
and "outstanding" mother

After the daily morning assembly there was a larger school wide assembly where one mother from every class was honored. There were speeches, singing, prayer and of course, Thai dancing. There was one mother, that the teachers explained was an “outstanding mother” and she was honored in front of the whole school. The whole thing was really very sweet. After the assembly every class split off and the one mother that was represented in each class went to their respective homeroom classrooms. I was told I can go and check out what they did in the classrooms with the mothers so I went to one of my favorite classes (M-2/1) and when I walked into the classroom, all of the students were sitting on the floor facing the mother sitting on a chair and they were signing to her, and the mom, with tissue in hand, was wiping away her tears. I would be lying if I said that I didn’t get a little choked up.. the whole thing was sooo cute. After the singing and showering her with gifts the mom gave a little speech to the students (which I obviously didn’t understand) but then we took lots of photos. I went back to the office and was talking to all the Thai teachers and explained how I htought the whole thing was soo nice and that I missed my mommy!

My M-2/3 students holding up their mother's day cards

After a morning assembly it can often be hard to get the kids focused the rest of the day because their heads are in a hyped a place. Well as true as that is for my students, it is just as true for me. There was no way I could just go back to teaching prepositions or about different occupations after such an awesome morning assembly. So what did I do? The rest of my classes that day I had them make mother’s day cards… in English of course. This was a fun activity for me to help them with, and I think the kids enjoyed it as well (if not they at least got a free period to do arts and crafts instead of study). Some of them came out really cute as well!

My M-4/1 making mother's day cards

 

on a side note-- this is the roster for one of my
eighth grade classes-- check out their English nicknames!

On another side note--I spent a day playing music for my students--a.k.a educated them on pink floyd..
don't worry i made it educational-- they had to listen for the prepositions in the song 

With the long weekend coming up (Friday off for mother’s day) I headed to somewhere I hadn’t been yet.. Hua Hin.. a cute town on the coast…I’ll blog about it next time!