In the middle of August our school hosted a group of elementary school teachers from Tokyo. The leader of the group, on the far left in the blue shirt, has come to Hanhongor three times now, and our teachers and students really look forward to his visits with his colleagues.

The teachers visited the school, met with teachers and kids, rode horses and camels, stayed in a ger, and on the last night partied down with us. We drank, ate cookies, played kendama,

danced,

and had a great time.

School has been in session for 2 weeks and things are going well. I have made these Marmot puppets, Monkzul and Mondol (which means baby marmot) to teach 3rd grade English with,

and thanks to a community grant from Friends of Mongolia our students now have close to 100 new books in Mongolian for fun reading.

Some of the titles are all the Twilight books, Hunger Games, Harry Potter, all 20 volumes  of the Chinggis Khan comic books, a bunch of classics like Treasure Island, Little Men, and Pippi Longstocking, as well as a wide variety of American, European, and Japanese graphic novels. We are still waiting on a final shipment of books but the ones we have have already seen heavy rotation with a waiting list for some of the more popular. Once I get FOM bookplates pasted into all the books they will be divided up and put in my classroom and the Mongolian language teacher’s classrooms where all the students can access them.