Howdy folks!

I'm killing three birds with one stone by writing a blog post, letter to Samuel, and letter to Brittany all at once.

We had 67 people in the first class last night! About 40 of those were kids. EEK! Mr. Roseber and I got to talking after class and both agreed that we have got to try something different than what we've been doing over the last month which has been having all the kids in one group doing drills of stance, punches, and some kicks. We're not doing enough repetition because we don't have any kind of lesson plan so the kids aren't retaining. We have enough teachers but we can't go through and individually correct because there's so many kids. Because of that half of them don't even have the basics of fudo dachi and how to make a fist; so we haven't gotten to even start on blocks or self-defenses. We don't have any problem kids-- we just have a lot of kids, most with short attention spans. Teaching anything physical like karate requires individual attention and we have just utterly failed in that so I guess it's no big surprise that our students are failing. This is no one's fault particularly and the only thing I can point my finger at is our (the brownbelts teaching the first class kids) general inexperience in teaching large groups or children. We're just going to have to experiment and learn as we go. I guess this has been lesson 1. Next week we're going to try the experiment of stations. I have high hopes for it because we'll have about 10 students at each station with one teacher and a definite thing to teach at each station. The foreseeable (is that a word?) problems are dividing the kids up, having room for each station, and switching between stations in a timely manner without losing kids in between stations. I sure hope it all works! If not, we'll try something else.

Sunday we had church in the new building and got to use all of it!! We were all ecstatic! It is a really nice building but we're already growing out of it. God rocks!

This afternoon is RCRY general meeting. We're going to be planning our September public meeting which will be a debate night on 1 or 2 current issues. Sure hope it goes well!

Samuel had his first day of classes Monday. He said it went well, he misses Jr. High, and he's real glad to be back.

I was going to write about the girls' Biblestudy on Friday, a tea party Naomi and I went to on Saturday, my fish having babies and the solution Mama found to their space problem, and my problem kid on Wednesday nights, but I'm getting a headache. I think I've stared at the screen too long and need some water. Toodles!