Monday:

Where would you like to go in China? Why do you want to go there? What would you do or see there? What is the food like? What places are difficult to reach? What makes the trip so difficult? Do you think you’ll ever be able to go?

The premise of somebody who wants to travel but can’t definitely resonates with most of our class. Out of my nearly 40 students, maybe 4 have ever been on an airplane. Meanwhile we’re planning the Jishou 2012 Olympics (Wednesday) and casually discussing states and countries around the world… I have a girl whose entire life goal seems to be to visit Australia. Koalas wander into her writings and example sentences, she shows up to class wearing Australian flag earrings. She gave me a drawing that showed her smiling classmates meeting Miryam and me at the Sydney Opera House.

So we approach the Flat Stanley lesson gradually. Each student has a sheet of paper and they get to design their own Flat Reon, Flat Bom, Flat Yolanda… Then we introduce each other. Hometowns: Jishou, Huaihua, small Hunan farming villages. Where do they want to go in China? How about if they could go anywhere in the world? Laughter. Almost every girl in my class wants her paper doll to be sent to Paris, where they can go clothes shopping (maybe they can share an envelope?). Flat Annabelle hopes she can sit on the slopes of Mount Fuji and look at the cherry blossoms. I hear a few soft “America”s.

Tomorrow we take the paper cutouts out around Jishou.

A lantern at Sofia’s birthday celebration.