School Daze

The day started today with a journey to Wilberforce for practicum day #4. Angela, the headteacher, started with an assembly about the importance of imagination. She actually began with "We are all human-beings. And the best thing about being a human being is having an imagination." Maybe you had to be there, but it was hilarious. All the teachers were snickering. Anyways, after the little lecture, Angela gave out awards and my class won Wilberta, the girl bear who indicates the best attendance from the week before. I was proud of 5T - they needed a little pick-me-up.

After that, Emily led a phenomenal literacy lesson. The kids were so responsive and actually enjoyed the activity. I was super impressed! They blew me away with their answers. Maths went well, too. I got to work with one table and this one student for most of the time. He really seemed to benefit from individualized attention and it made me happy when his behavior improved, he focused more, and actually got it. Yay!!

I spent lunch with Jordan in the staff room after helping the same student with some homework.

After lunch came the more stressful part of the day. Year 5 was split into two groups - students who had been on god behavior got to go with the other teacher to do a special activity. Students who had performed improperly stayed in Emily's classroom to do more literacy. Oh my goodness gracious - a room full of 20 misbehaving boys and 2 pretty good girls was a handful! I worked with one table and, while two boys were surprisingly wonderful, the other two were ridiculously bad. They tried to convince me that they couldn't read and that they were incapable of doing work. I had to use my teacher voice and my "look." It was effective most of the time, which made me feel good.

After the ok literacy lesson, Emily took the students who were behaving well to ICT (or computers/technology). Surprisingly, after a bit of yelling/hitting/fighting, the kids worked really hard and became very polite. They asked for my help a lot and then said thank you! I was uber impressed!

I talked to Emily after school and she seemed exhausted. I am going to start doing some one-on-one work with the students and work with reading groups in my next couple sessions. I also am going to go to school on Friday, for the fun of it.

After school, we got coffee and headed off to seminar. We were doing presentations and got to learn about other people's schools. I wasn't feeling too hot by this point in the day, so I was a bit irritable. I hate being irritable =( Anyways, now I'm off to do some work and maybe get to bed early? I hope to talk to you all soon!