What a day! What a day! When I first stepped into Scott’s Hall Primary School I felt very apprehensive and wary about the school. I felt that I had a real bond with the students at Alman Hill and I was sad to leave it. However, after the very relaxing beach weekend I felt prepared enough to go to Scott’s Hall and bond with the new students.
During the first day I would say that the students were a little confused about why we where there, however, I noticed our purpose became apparent to the students when we began to teach them. Also, I was pleased that a majority of my project in the library was completed on Monday. My only issue is that while in the class, I felt as though I was leading the class more often than my partners. It didn’t bother me very much, but I learned from this experience how important it is to participate evenly in a group setting. In order to stop this from happening again, I made sure it was clear when we wrote our lesson plan that everyone knew what parts belonged to which person and that everybody had a role in the lessons.
When we got to the school early this morning, it turned out that we arrived in time to witness the school at devotion which I can honestly say was my favorite part of the day (there’s just something about little kids singing in unison that puts me in a good mood), and we were also introduced to the students of the school “officially” for the first time and then went with our students to their classes. After a quick discussion with Sean about which lessons to start off with first, we jumped into the day’s activities. In the morning we did a lesson on verbs and their uses. During the lesson I noticed that some of the students were becoming distracted. So literally on the spot I came up with this game which is similar to Jeopardy! in which I had the students come up to the board and select words. They had to identify these words as either a noun, which we had worked on Monday, or verbs. The kids loved this game! They became so competitive and engaged I had to convince them to take their break. When we discovered how much they enjoyed competition, the rest of our teaching plan was thrown out the window. For the rest of the day, instead of a standing in front of the class and teaching like a normal teacher, we took our class outside and played Math Tag which was completely Sean’s idea. I felt that they learned a lot from that even though we didn’t present the information in a traditional way.
When one o’clock came around I felt energized to finish the library project. Because we were ahead of schedule in the library, the project was a piece of cake! Throughout the entire process I felt that everyone worked well together, and the project went smoothly. In fact we finished so early that I got the chance to help another group begin to paint their project. Overall I feel that it was a good day and I can tell that there is a change in the mood of the group; those who were tired are now up and ready to work and I can tell that many people are putting their homesickness aside in order to finish up these last couple of days.
Robin P., Central High School