Celebrating Mother's Day and other Happenings

Today, May 26 is Mother's Day in Poland. It is always this date without regard for what day of the week this is. Thus, Mother's Day is different here than in the States (and I saw the same thing earlier this month in Hungary when that country celebrated Mother's Day on a different date) for the celebration always includes a school celebration.

Today was our last day at the Cisie School.

 Above is an outside view of this school. I believe this building is now at least 50 years old.

We enter the school through a very small kitchen area. Then one comes into the first floor hallway. This school is built with classrooms only on one side of a very wide hall. The wide hall becomes a place for recreation and other activities. A ping-pong table is obviously a feature here. This style of building is not unique to Poland. I saw the same building style during my visits to schools last year while living in Hungary.

I did a class with my 4th graders and then we took photos.

At the right I am with the boys. One of the girls took this photo and caught me at a moment with clearly I was distracted by one of the boys. These are really great kids. They really worked hard.

And here are the girls. We had a great background for these photos because we used the room set aside for teaching Polish language and culture classes.

Then we all went to small gym in this building for the Mother's Day presentation.

Here are some videos of the program. First is some of the program presented by the 2nd graders. I worked with these students twice when the 3rd graders were busy with other activities.

 The above video are some of my third grade students.
 
And who has a heart that would not melt when seeing these students from Grade 0, which is what kindergarten is called in Poland.

Following the program I was called back to classroom where I was joined by all the 3rd and 4th graders who sang Sto Lat to me and gave me a gift -- a CD entitled, "A Foreigner's Guide to Learning Polish."

I had my last tutoring session with my university student this afternoon and she surprised me with a bottle of Chopin Vodka. Now I'll have to figure out how to pack very carefully, so it actually makes the trip all the way back to Minnesota.