Week 2

This week was my second week working with the students in the VPK program at Starke Elementary. This has been an exciting week! We got a few more students in the class so now we have twenty students total. The students’ personalities have begun to show even more. This is great for some of the kids who now are more comfortable and willing to speak more and answer questions. However, for some this means that they are trying to push boundaries and test us to see how much they can get away with. Having volunteers helps the teachers out a lot with these students. I can handle the disruptive students while the teachers are teaching so that they do not have to stop the lesson and lose the rest of the class’ attention. I also have been able to help with testing the students so that we can see what they already know and what they need to learn before the fall. I have been able to connect with the teachers and students and form relationships with them, making this a great experience so far.

This week I also had the opportunity to teach a math lesson! I was very excited to get to do this since it has been a while since I have taught a lesson to a whole class of students. I taught them about sorting and grouping objects based on color and shape. The students grasped this concept with the different activities that we did, however it ended up being more difficult to teach them than I anticipated. The first problem was that I lost my voice that day. I was still able to teach, but I was not as loud as I needed to be and I was a little more worn out than usual. I also have never taught students this young before, this past year I taught third and fourth graders who are a lot different than the kids in Pre-K. I had to constantly stop what I was teaching to remind that their voices should be quiet, their bodies should be still, they should be sitting “crisscross applesauce,” and their ears should be listening.  During the lesson and afterwards I was a little discouraged that the lesson did not go quite as planned. But after really thinking about it I realized that even when the teachers teach they have the same problems as I did and they have been teaching for over 20 years. I learned a lot from this lesson and am excited to teach them again soon!