The last couple weeks of the school year were a whirlwind! We said goodbye to our students, packed up our classrooms, packed our bags for home, and moved everything else into our new apartment. Our travel back to the States went smoothly and we only had a slight delay on our connection to Detroit. We landed in Michigan on Thursday, hit the ground running, and have been on the go ever since!

Here’s a look at our first few days of summer…

During the last two months, I trained with the running club. The running club met once a week since last fall. It is a group of sixth grade students led by two friends of mine. After running in the ActiveWater 5k, the running club set a goal to run 10 kilometers from our neighborhood to Panora Mall.

The two boys that ran with me are both in my sixth grade class. I enjoyed the opportunity to connect with them outside of the formal classroom setting. As we ran, we worked together to find a reasonable, but challenging pace.

Because we live in Ankara, the first 6 or 7 kilometers were pretty much uphill, with over 600 feet in altitude gain. We were fortunate to have a good downhill finish.

When we reached the finish, there were friends waiting for us with water and congratulations.

I am proud of all of my running partners. They demonstrated hard work and perseverance throughout the race. I’ve had a lot of fun and am thankful for the conversations we’ve had on the trail.

I was the new yearbook teacher this semester. Yearbook was an elective for secondary students. I had 14 kids in the class: 2 freshmen, 1 sophomore, 3 juniors, and 8 seniors. Luckily half of them were in my Computer Graphic Design class in the fall, so many were familiar with design principles and the computer programs. We used Scribus to layout the spreads and Gimp to edit photographs. Some students used Inkscape to create vector artwork.

I was a bit intimidated to teach the class since I was never on yearbook staff in high school or in college. I was, however, on my college’s newspaper staff, so I had experience with publication design. I am very thankful to one of my college professors who gave me some fantastic resources.

The first week, I had all of the students sign up for a Gmail account if they didn’t have one already. For almost every step of the process, I had students refer to documents on Google Drive. We had a spread assignment sheet, student and faculty lists, style guide information, and more. Every student was assigned a grade level mugshot and feature page. After that, they were assigned various spreads. We referred to these as spread #3, #4, and #5. If a student couldn’t remember what their next assignment was, I told them to look it up online.

We spent the first 4 weeks of the semester learning about publication design, copywriting, yearbook spreads, photography, and photo editing. After that, we had less than 15 weeks to write and edit articles, create mock ups, edit photos, make revisions, and finalize the pages.

While I had students print out some of their spreads, a lot of my grading was done on the school server. Our tech director set up preferences so I had access to all folders and files. This made it easier for me to check alignment, resolution, file links, etc.

I was so excited the yearbooks arrived today!

The class voted and decided on the theme “A Lion’s Tale.” Our mascot is the lion.

The students did excellent work! One of the seniors created the table of contents with absolutely no art direction from me:

Every grade had a “mugshot” spread and an additional feature spread that included an article about the class:

We had 14 seniors this year. Another senior came up with the idea and design for these pages:

We highlighted all of the school’s extra curricular activities. Most of these ended up being 1 page spreads:

School events were 2-page spreads:

The yearbook class was so creative! They thought up and executed a staff face-swap page. Can you find David’s and my face or body?

I put together the index page with the help of several students:

A junior designed the front and back cover. Most students created cover options and we voted on our favorite:

Today was the first of the half days for finals. We’ll distribute the yearbooks on Monday. I can’t wait!

There have been many protests happening in Turkey the past couple of days. You might have heard about them in the news.

It’s been an interesting time in Ankara. Most of the activity is happening in the downtown regions, which we’ve been avoiding. There has been some commotion in our neighborhood, though. (We feel safe – the protests are not targeting foreigners.)

David took a couple videos last night:

Please keep the country of Turkey in your prayers.

Recently, the fifth and sixth grade classes went to the Feza Gürsey Science Center at Altınpark. When we first arrived, we were treated to a presentation on static electricity. This was a lot of fun and several of the students touched a static electricity generator that made their hair go frizzy. I especially enjoyed the presentation because it centered around material we had just covered in class. The students were very entertained by the presentation and loved seeing their friends’ hair rise up.

During the presentation, two students went up to show how humans are good conductors of electricity (due to 70% of the human body being made up of water). These two were embarrassed when the man presenting required them to hold hands and typical adolescent giggles followed among their friends.

After the presentation, students walked around and participated in a variety of hands on exhibits. There was a phosphoric wall, many reaction time experiments, momentum explorations, and energy exhibits. It was not hard to keep the students entertained and they were disappointed when our time was up.

Although the students were disappointed to leave the exhibits, they soon were enjoying time in the park with friends. We finished the trip off with ice cream for everyone. Some students brought extra money and treated themselves or friends to extra treats.

Soon it was time to head back to the school. I am so glad that we were able to take this field trip. As I said before, much of the material we covered this year in class was demonstrated at the science center. My students benefited from the hands-on learning experience and time spent with their friends. I benefited from the time spent outside the classroom with my students.