Day 7- Florence

Today is Wednesday and it is the seventh day of our trip. I'm starting to get homesick but the girls that I am with are great with making me laugh to keep my mind off thinking about my family. Today I went to a primary school which is in relation to our elementary schools, so that was right up my alley! I had so much fun playing with the kids. They showed us a dance, that is posted, from High School Musical and they sang and danced for us in English. In return, we taught them a game that we, my peers, used to play when we were their age. It was a hand slapping game that went a little like this: Down by the banks were the hanky panky and the bull frog jumped from bank to banky with an eeps, ops, ohps, ops, eeps ops ohps ops and it goes kersplash!!!! After the school we had the day for investigations. While on this trip, we all have to do our individual investigations on something we find interesting in Italy. Mine have to do with the class sizes here compared to the sizes of classes at home in America and also the relationships developing in classrooms in Italy compared to the relationships in America. Since all my research is done inside the schools we visit, I decided to go to Pisa to look at the Leaning Tower along with a couple other girls. It took us an hour by train to get to Pisa for only 5 Euro, which is really good!!! We had to take the pictures of us holding it up and actually it isn't that easy trying to get the picture perfect. It took at least five minutes to get our hands right so that it looks like we are holding up the tower. We only stayed in Pisa for about two and a half hours then went back to our home in Florence.
On Monday we visited a High School here in Florence. This was the week of the students final tests so we were not able to visit with the students but we did get to see the school and some of the empty classrooms. There are many different high schools that students in Florence can attend to help prepare them for their University studies.
Tuesday, Dr. Morrison cooked us a delicious meal and to our suprise the Vice Provost of Kent State University, Dr. Steven Michael came for a visit to Anne's apartment. It was very nice to meet him and have dinner with him. He explained a few of his ideas and they sound very interesting and I hope that he follows through with his ideas about expanding our study abroad horizons.
That is all I have for now!!!
Good Night!