today was great. chuy and i are communicating better and he's beginning to trust me more. today was the first day i felt like we were truly and 100% a team, working together to bring our students an education. sweet!
jose can be pretty resistant to school sometimes. i think part of it is because he knows he's the oldest and he also knows he can't do what a lot of the other kids in his class can...read, write quickly and neatly, and other things like that. he needs a lot of one on one time to get a task accomplished, and it's really hard because i don't always have the time he needs (the life of a teacher, regardless of the country or language, right?). during science we were talking about bodies and drawing ourselves, and i worked with jose to get this out of him - the yellow paper in the background. he worked so hard and was so proud. can't you tell?

i took ely for a walk this afternoon...so fun. we walked by our neighbor's house, and he grows peppers and grapes so we were looking at them up close. there was a tree outside his property that had purple berry looking things on it, so i thought i'd try one. well i can safely say they were not berries. it was the nastiest thing - really bitter and sour. i couldn't get the taste out of my mouth and ely was doing her laugh-so-hard-i-get-nervous thing. eek. totally worth it though for her to laugh like that.