2nd Week of School

Greetings all! Week 2 of student teaching is now complete and I must say, I continue to love it! My cooperating teacher and I are getting along extremely well, and this past week Mr.Enright (Joe) taught the first half of the day and let me teach the second half of each day. It was great and challenging and really fun. I had a fantastic lesson on Wednesday - we studied poetry and the kids all wrote their own "daydream" poems, that started "Ms. Ruf thinks I'm listening but I'm really . . ." They wrote adorable poems and I was so proud of them and myself that I walked around taking pictures of all their poems! I also put together a science lesson on food and the food pyramid and we got to take a trip to the school's science room to do all our fun interactive stuff. I'm sure that at some point in time the newness of this whole teaching business will wear off a bit and I'll calm down, but right now everything is exciting to me!!!

A couple other interesting things to note . . .

1) Even though we all speak English there are several terms or things that we do NOT use the same words for. Example: my students had no clue what I was saying when I told them to use their eraser to erase any mistakes. Instead an eraser is actually called a "rubber" and I have to tell them to "rub out" all their mistakes. A little odd! Also, a checkmark is a "tick", you must say "trousers" or "slacks" because "pants" actually means "underwear", and there is no such room as the "bathroom" - the whole room is actually called the "toilet"!

2) My students start with a music lesson each morning - which translates to 27 tin whistles being "played" at the same time by 8-year olds who are really more interested in being the loudest player, rather than most accurate musician! A lovely wake-up call, especially since I've always been such a morning person!

I have pictures of my students and our classroom coming soon! I haven't mastered the whole digital camera thing quite yet (yes I KNOW that sounds ridiculous), and I keep forgetting to transfer pictures from my camera to my computer to my memory stick to the computer at the internet cafe! Whew, that's a lot of technical steps . . . especially for me!