We arrived safe and sound back in the good ol’ USA last Tuesday evening late, August 1st. Here’s a little bit about our last day of classes and our flight to Beijing.

We were sad to see our time at Hainan University come to an end. We all enjoyed our classes so much this summer. I am putting pictures of each of us below so that you can see us in action. The students were placed in our classes not only on the basis of age, but also on the student’s individual language ability. I will put pictures of our classes from the oldest students to the youngest.

Yvonne taught the university aged students, but several younger students were in her class because their English was so strong.

Jean taught the class of mainly high school aged students.

I taught the middle school aged students. Since I had always enjoyed this age group in my early years as a teacher, I was happy to teach kids of that age again. We probably enjoyed ourselves far too much.

Becka taught the youngest children - ages 7 to 9. In case you wonder what she’s doing in the picture below - her kids loved to sing the action songs she taught them.

Becka had as one of her main themes “animals” and had many fun craft projects for the kids to do. Below is a picture of some of her students’ paper penguins.

We left on Saturday, July 29 to spend several days in Beijing. Even though we left our apartments at 6:30 a.m., we were surprised and pleased that some of our students from this year and last year came to see us off. Below is a picture of those who assembled to bid us farewell.

On our flight from Haikou to Beijing I was very surprised to see one of my students from last summer on the plane with her parents. Though my class last year was mainly university-aged students, this middle school girl named Nancy had by far the best English in the class. I was sad not to have seen her on campus this summer since she was not able to take classes from any of us; therefore, this was a very pleasant reunion for us both. Below is a picture of Nancy and her parents. The three of them were going to Beijing for several days since her dad had to go there on a business trip.

One of Ruth’s Chinese friends had asked us to carry some frozen Wenchang chickens to a friend of hers who lives in Beijing. This friend agreed to meet us at the airport. Since we did not know her, she held up a sign with our name on it. This was actually the fulfillment of one of Becka’s dreams - to have someone at a foreign airport holding up a sign with her name on it.

I will do another blog entry in several days to show what we saw while we were in Beijing.