Back to school

Liam's been doing really well keeping up with the year 7 maths, english and science work and he has moved onto year 8 in maths, We thought that it'd be a good experience for him to spend some time in a NZ school, meeting some kids and having some time away from us!

As we'll be in Hikutaia for 5 weeks we thought we might be able to get him into the local school. Well it turns out that they break up for holidays on 2nd July. And whilst we knew that we'd probably have to seek an international student permit and pay the school some fees. It turns out that we wouldn't have been able to secure one in time and also the school we had in mind (at the end of the road) couldn't take Liam anyway because they don't hold a 'code of conduct signatory', which is a Ministry of Education requirement for international students. So, the headteacher came up with a solution; Liam will attend school as a visitor a couple of afternoons a week. For free. This seems ideal for everyone concerned. The class Liam will be visiting consists of about 25 kids, it's a small school so three years are taught in one - years 6, 7 & 8.

Today was Liam's first day in Mr Flanagan's class - I'll let him take it from here:

My first afternoon of school started with silent reading for half an hour, I started reading a book about the war, the only quote I remember is "Don't cry! It's what Hitler wants!" As I read, I couldn't help thinking I could read at home!

The boy who sat next to me was called Slade and wouldn't stop pestering me with questions. The boy in front of me said 6 times (as if we hadn't heard him the first time) "This isn't 100 questions!" After watching everybody write down their targets, people read out their stories that all had to start with the sentence "Sean opened the forbidden door" - pretty straightforward but that doesn't mean they had to make their stories even the least staightforward. This is a shortened version of what this kid wrote: Sean opened the forbidden door and inside the room were guns on the walls everywhere, he ran around looking at all of the guns and on a table he found a box with marijuana in it. He picked up a crossbow and played about with it. He tripped over a big gun on the floor and it pointed at his face and fired, his mum and dad found him dead. The end. From bloodthirsty beasts to very hungry zombies, nothing was too far fetched. After this, school ended. We didn't get much actual work done, oh well, never mind.