Welcome to ThaiMerican Tales!

To Kru Alin and our new Thai friends...greetings! We start this adventure as a way to connect a group of motivated students that live roughly 13,000 kilometers apart. 13,000 km...now that would sure be a long walk, wouldn't it!

My name is Tom Hopper (You all can refer to me as Mr. Tom in this blog), and for the benefit of my Chippewa Middle School students, "Kru Alin" is Edie Wilson. (Kru means "teacher" in Thai and "Alin" means something like bumble bee!) Edie was a 7th grade student of mine here in Okemos, Michigan a few years back. I'll let her answer the question of "how long ago" if she would like!

Anyway, this pen pal connection was her FABULOUS idea and I am very proud of what she is doing as a teacher. That is certainly worth a long-distance high-five from me!

So what are we talking about here, and how do we go about creating these connections? Well, I have heard from Kru Alin that her students are pretty much curious about everything we do here! Our culture and lifestyle, our weather (Strange this year so far!!), the food we eat and the celebrities we follow. They also want to know many other things like what sports we play/sports teams we follow, the places we have traveled to, and many other fun things! I'll share more later.

Each time any of you write a post, please end it with the name you would like to be called (I will demo this). Also, let's all try to reply to each and every post...so American kids be sure to scroll through all posts looking for those from our Thai friends, and Thai friends you should do the same! As another small hint to get things started, maybe posts should stick to one or two topics (like clothes you like to wear and sports you like to play). Lastly, each of your first posts should be a very brief introduction of yourself to your new friends.

I hope that I have done enough to get us all headed on our fun adventure. Thanks, Kru Alin!

Signed,
Mr. Tom

(Update: The first of the posts from Kru Alin's M4 students have been published as a series of pictures. Let's see if we can get a response to all of them very soon!)