I'll start off day four with four words. Husky on a moped.

But that was how my day ended - seeing a husky ride with it's owner on a moped. See, what should be the most amazing thing about that is the fact that Huskies are big dogs, and so how on earth could you fit one, with the owner, on a one man vehicle? The truth is however that there is one more more impressive fact - you never ever see big dogs in China, because dogs over a particular size are banned. Any time you see a big dog, it's out at night time when it's less likely to be spotted.

Anyway, that really was a small part of my day. I promised yesterday I would say a little about lesson planning, so lets talk about that a little. First thing to say, is that I find lesson planning to be one of the hardest things about being a volunteer teacher. I'm determined to make good lessons, but it takes time - especially when you have to take into account what students actually respond to, what I can explain to them in English or basic Chinese, and whether or not they already know the content of the lesson.

I'm pretty sure i've never taken less than 2 hours on a lesson planning. That's 2 and a half times of the length of the lessons, as they are 45 minutes long in China.

The usual process is first to come up with a topic for the lesson, then work out what content to put in related to the topic. Next is to turn vocab/grammar etc into a structured lesson which they learn in, but also isn't just plain boring. Once I have all the materials, I have to present it in some way that is understandable for the students, but also covers a fair bit.

As for teaching materials, I have a text book, but I only use it to keep track of what my students are studying with their Chinese English teachers. If I use the text book, they will end up doing the exercises twice, so I must make all my material from scratch. What i sometimes do is throw the grammar that they are learning into my lessons quietly, so they are practicing things that I know are new to them.

So about today's happenings. Mondays are a four lesson day - it also happens to the day with the most lessons. I only recently found out that four lessons in a day is actually quite a lot for a fully fledged Chinese teacher, despite the 8 lessons in a Chinese school's day. My lessons, until the last one, went rather nicely today. I decided to do some work on technology, and introduced words for things like smart phones and laptops. It might seem pretty specialist, but if I make my topics too 'simple' I end up with half the class knowing all the words, and just chatting to their friends for the whole lesson. I also used today's lesson to check how well they know the form of verbs in different tenses. Despite the majority of students thinking that they are rubbish at English, they all were excellent on every indicative verb form. I left out the passive, because if the text book is correct, they don't know the passive yet. I certainly didn't know it in German at their age, so it would be impressive if they did know it.

A new thing I tried in my classroom today was how I use my little fluffy dog toy. For the last two weeks, i've just thrown it to students and asked them to answer questions. This time, I got the students to throw the dog to other students. And students get much more out of it that way. They pay more attention, and they get the joy of annoying their friends with a flying ball of fluff.

Another occurrence today is that I was finally paid! I was meant to be paid on the 25th, and it's now the 4th. Luckily I spend very little, and had more than enough to get by whilst I waited. My salary was late last month too, so I wasn't annoyed in the slightest about it being late, just even happier when it did finally arrive.

I usually eat at restaurants for lunch - it's fairly cheap in China, and there are places all around the school. Today, I went to a place I go to a fair bit, but hadn't been in for a few weeks. Like most food places, it's a small family-run place. It doesn't look particularly inviting, with it's bare concrete walls, battered wooden tables, and the fact that it's built into the basement of a building. However, the staff are really friendly and can whip up a great bowl of noodles in minutes. Restuarant food is generally ultra quick here too. All the food is prepared and ready to go in the wok, so all there is to do is cook it - and food cooks quickly in a wok. The woman who runs the place looks incredibly happy every time i use Chinese, and for me, that's just another reason to go there again!

Rosie has also told me today to expect the cold to arrive by the end of the week. Karamay, a town perhaps only a hunded miles away (nothing by Xinjiang standards), has already been hit by the snow, so we're next. And yes, when I say that we're next, I do mean that there is pretty much no town between Kuitun and Karamay, despite the longish distance.

Hmm, I don't think that there is much more to say today, so i'll leave anything else until tomorrow!