On the subject of teaching activities...

Jackie and I had some good fun in our Arabic class today. Since it's just the two of us, we can do whatever we want for our classes. So today, we continued to talk about a picture that we quickly threw together two minutes before we started:
I am especially proud of the blue goat that I so artistically drew. We even made cut outs of some of the animals! One of the cats, the blue goat, as well as all three birds can actually move! So today we practiced the colours that we learned last week, as well as learned some new vocabulary for "bird" and the plural for "cats" and "goats".

Today were able to discuss jumping and climbing up and eating grass and eating birds and sleeping in the grass... the possibilities for telling simple stories are endless when you have a couple of cats, goats, birds, trees, grass and flowers. And it makes me and Jackie feel pretty good about ourselves when we can move a little paper cat around a piece of paper, telling each other, "The black cat is hungry. He sees a pink bird in the tree. He is going to climb the tree. He climbs the tree. The bird sees the black cat. The bird is scared of the cat. The bird jumps from the little tree to the big tree. The cat climbs down the tree and goes to sleep in the grass."

But considering that we're still in our first month of lessons, and we only have two hours of lessons a week, the fact that we can tell a story like this makes me feel pretty good about our progress! We also have a very patient teacher who puts up with, and almost enjoys, all of our funny methods of learning Arabic - including my magic blue goat who can fly from tree to tree!