I have to admit, it's a very satisfying school to learn in (with thanks to Charlie Brown)

School in Venezuela is a lot different than in my school in Iowa. My school is called Mi Pequeño Mundo. It translates in English to My Small World, weird name huh?! The play ground here is so much better than the one at my school in the United States. We have swings and a tree to climb on. Our teacher lets us play on them in a lot more dangerous ways than in the United States. We can stand on the swings, jump off the swings, and go very high up in the tree. I don’t even think that you would last five seconds doing those things in my school in Des Moines.

My school is a house that was turned into a school. The Grandmother of the people who live in the house is the cook. That’s why the cafeteria food is so good because it is homemade! The back yard of the house was converted into the playground, and my classroom used to be a bedroom!

When it was time for school to start, I felt very nervous because everyone speaks Spanish. My school has kids from daycare through sixth grade. The room I am in is a fifth and sixth grade class. Eleven students study together in our classroom along with our teacher Nancy. One student speaks English because she lived in the USA for three years. She helps me out a lot and tells me what the teacher wants us to do, but I listen anyway so that I will learn Spanish. Also she tells it in the short version. The teacher will keep talking for ten minutes at a time! (I am not kidding.)

The school days last only four hours from 8-12, but we also include in our schedule art and music on Tuesdays and Thursdays from 2-6 pm. We got off to a slow start. We only wrote down what we wanted to do this year and identified simple fractions. Then later in the year we started doing more typical school work such as long multiplication, writing stories and cooking projects. About the cooking projects… the class is doing international foods. My projects have been on American food such as brownies, pumpkin pie, and mac and cheese.

Our school at first was not very strict. The teachers used to let us wrestle on the trampoline, throw rocks at each other (slowly), and they even let us bring our game systems to school on Fridays! The teachers have a lot more faith in their students than in the United States, don’t you think? Believe it or not, no one got hurt! (But some people did get distracted by their game stations in class). Luckily, our teacher banned students in our class from playing game systems at school.

I thought that school would be very challenging for me, but Mi Pequeño Mundo turned out to be not that hard. I ended up liking my school a whole lot because we have a great playground, awesome cafeteria food, and we study a lot more kinds of things than in the USA. Unfortunately, I do not speak Spanish fluently so I cannot yet understand everything. I am trying to learn Spanish in school and I keep improving.