I Made It!

I made it through the first half of the year. I have really learned a lot and I hope to go back next month with a new perspective. I have had a lot of new experiences and I think I'm finally starting to like teaching. When I first started I was really excited, but, it didn't take long for me to question whether or not I had made the right decision. I felt totally unprepared for the problems my students have. However, I feel much better now looking back on the experiences I have had. I also got my mid year evaluation and my principal didn't have anything to complain about. In fact she complemented me on how much my classroom management has improved and my consistent test scores. Yay! I feel much better now that I know barring any disasters I should be hired back next year. However, she did suggest that I work on my organizational skills. I have piles for everything and I know where everything is, but I understand why she would like to see it more organized.

Friday was our "Winter Program." My class teamed up with another third grade class next door and we sang "Reindeer Jive" and "Feliz Navidad." "Reindeer Jive" is the cutest song ever! For that song our kids all made antler hats and they had a dance for it. For "Feliz Navidad" they made maracas. They all had a great time. I also had the kids make picture frames to give to their parents for Christmas. Let me tell you something, I am so tired of art projects! I had to hot glue together 34 picture frames so that my students could make one for each parent since most come from split homes. Then, we used paper mache (I think that's how it's spelled but if I spelled it wrong I mean ma-shay) and blown up water balloons to make the maracas, so having about 40 kids working on those was a chore. After they dried we had them paint the maracas. Then, after the paint dried I poured rock salt and hot glued sticks into each maraca. It was really time consuming! Anyway after lunch yesterday we had a small party in the classroom. I gave all of my kids a book, a pair of gloves, a pencil and some candy. They all really liked their gifts! I had one student get me a magnet that said "Teachers make the little ones count" or something like that. Another student got me a picture frame snow globe. Most of my students gave me some candy or something like that. It was really exciting!
Darren is coming down to visit my family and go to a family Christmas party with me so that's exciting! But, that's about all for now!

And sometimes they do something nice...

Most of the time I feel as though I'm fighting an uphill battle with my students. It is hard to make them care about much of anything. However, yesterday they did something that I found to be absolutely adorable. There was a spider that came down from the ceiling(yuck!) during class yesterday and one of my kids, a seriously disturbed little boy, got up from his desk and tried to kill it. Then I hear, "Don't kill her! That's Charlotte!" I found this to be just so precious because we are reading Charlotte's Web right now and my kids actually care about something! So all day long I heard conversations about how Charlotte had come to visit us, (obviously we haven't read the end of the book yet) but it was still a great moment even though I HATE spiders!