Friday had a funny start because I had to take my bag with me to school because I was leaving straight from there and heading to Killarney to catch the bus to Galway City for the weekend. So here I am walking to school carrying my bright and colorful handbag and toting my small pink suitcase behind me. I am got quite a few stares on my walk...guess I was probably a sight. I can only imagine the locals wondering what that crazy American teacher was up to!
The morning in school went by rather quickly and I had a great teaching moment with one of my fourth grade students during math that I later got to share with the whole class. The fourth graders are working on multiplication and some have a little bit of difficulty remembering their facts without having to count it out by multiples. Anyways…I was working with one student who sometimes struggles and he was working with multiplying by nine which can be tricky. So I decided to use this time and show him a fun way to figure it out using his hands. The look on his face when he saw how easy it was will stay with me forever…it was absolutely priceless! He wanted to share it with his teacher and was so proud of himself for now being able to quickly compute his 9s multiplication facts. The teacher thought this method was brilliant and was something she had never heard of before…so yeah me!!
Then after lunch the local florist came in to teach the student about floral arranging. The Church of Ireland here in Sneem is celebrating their bicentennial this week and was having a floral arranging competition 
as part of the week long celebration. We encouraged the students to take part in this by allowing them time in the classroom to work on their creations. They were to bring in gathering flowers from the area that reminded them of fall & autumn to match the theme of the contest. The students all did a great job arranging their flowers and worked really hard. I was really impressed to see how focused they were and they also did a great job sharing and working together. 
After school I headed to Killarney with a teacher from my school that lives there. She dropped me off at the bus station where I would catch the bus with Rachel for Galway City where we would meet up with 3 other fellow COST student teachers from the states. It was a long evening on the bus but it gave me plenty of time to enjoy the countryside and many fabulous views of Ireland. Since my arrival I really haven’t been out of Sneem that much to see more of Ireland, but the bus ride took care of that! It was neat to go through all of the small towns and villages. Ireland certainly is full of small picturesque towns that are very quaint and colorful. We finally made it to Galway City and took a taxi to the hotel where we met up with the rest of our group. We spent the evening hanging out and getting to know each other and talking about things we would like to do during our weekend stay in Galway City. I was excited to see and explore a new part of Ireland and was ready for a fun and adventurous weekend!
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