10/2

My P1 Girls

And the exciting mornings continue.  Yesterday Katie and I both splurged on some almonds for 8 US dollars since we had finally run out of the ones we brought with us.  I had eaten about 3 nuts when I looked down at my bag and saw bugs crawling all over them.  Are you kidding?! Bugs in my bed, while I go to the bathroom, and now in my food?! UGH!  I showed Doreen and asked her if she thought I could return them and she said no.  Well I was going to try.  So before school Katie and I went back to the supermarket where we bought them and he DID let me exchange them for a new bag. 

Hanging out with Evan

For my English lesson today I began with a new morning meeting.  Last week I continued to do the same greeting and activity every time just because it was new for them.  But today I introduced a new greeting and a new game.  The greeting I had them do was just a simple finger touch, so simple, yet so fun for them.  The game we played was Who’s Missing?  The kids sat in a circle and one student went and closed their eyes outside the circle and then we quietly sent one student out of the room.  Then the student with his or her eyes closed came back and had to figure out who was missing.  After the morning meeting we started learning about basic health and hygiene. Oh joy.  One of the activities I had the students do in the lesson was play charades.  They acted out things such as brushing their teeth, washing their face, washing their clothes, ironing their clothes, and cutting their nails and so on.  It was a good way to get them associating images/actions with words.  One thing that worked really well in this lesson was keeping the students on the floor.  They were on the floor for the morning meeting and I figured I could eliminate one of the transitions (which they often struggle with) and just keep them on the floor.  Not only did it eliminate the transition, but also the students seemed to remain more engaged on the floor.  This is definitely something I will consider for my future lessons. 

In math it would be my final day working with the number line.  I had already given 5 days to two lessons that were supposed to take me 2 days.  Opps.  I just didn’t have it in me to move on when only 5 students knew what they were doing.  What’s more is that the kids still probably could have used another week with the number line.  Looking ahead none of my math units that I have left to teach actually deal with direct numbers, so I can only hope that somehow my number line will come up again in the future.  But I felt content knowing that most of my students were able to do the addition problems we had been working on, and those that were still struggling I was able to sit down with and work one-on-one with today. 

During the morning break time I also added more words to the Word Wall that I put up in the classroom.  Here is a picture of part of it!

Word Wall