Its has been a long time

Ok, so I have to apologize for not writing sooner. I know I get on everyone else for not keeping up with their blogs, but I have no room to talk, now do I? I have been pretty busy these past few weeks. For one of my classes I have to do 70 hours in the classroom. I was assigned to a first grade and a fourth grade classroom, with 35 hours in each. I am fortunate that I do not have class during the day on Monday, Wednesday or Friday, so I can stay all day and knock the hours out. I started a couple weeks ago, and I spend 5 whole days in the first grade classroom. Those kids have changed my mind about which grade I want to teach. I don't think I would mind teaching the younger kids, which surprised me. I got to do so much with the class. I gave spelling tests, read stories, helped them with their work, and for one day I took over the whole class and taught all the lessons. The college class this is for is Classroom Management, and so I was supposed to pay attention to what makes the classroom run smoothly. This teacher had a routine for everything, which was great for the kids. She taught language arts only, so she had two separate classes of kids that switched right before lunch. The thing I noticed is that the afternoon class was always rushing and often didn't have time for all the work they needed to do. But other than that, it was kind of nice to teach the same lesson twice. If it didn't go smoothly in the morning, you can change it and make it better for the afternoon.
I've been in the 4th grade now for 2 classes, and it is a big change. The teacher is less organized, but she has good intentions. She has a lot of information that she wants to impart to me. I don't think she realizes how little time I'm going to be there. She keeps making plans, but she has a terrible memory and forgets, so it is ok. It all works out. She had me design a book report project for the class. They read biographies of famous women, so I made a paper bag puppet of Hillary Clinton as an example.



This is my first attempt. The final product was much better. But you get the idea. It looks sort of like her, huh?

So far, it has been fun to be in the classroom. I guess the more experience I get inside the room the more I feel like I could do this someday. And that someday is coming up very quickly. This spring I have a 150 hour practicum, half of that will be at the Child Study Center at ODU working with preschoolers. And then in the Fall I will have my Teacher Candidate Internship, otherwise known as Student Teaching. So exciting! (: But seriously, I have the worst case of senior-itis. It is getting terrible. The instructors ask for some ridiculous things, and I'm so close to the end of the Bachelor's that it is hard to do it sometimes. But all I need to do is get it done.

Oh, so I took a test on Tuesday for my Legal Aspects of Special Ed class. I did horrible. On the first test I missed 5, and thought I did bad, but I actually got the highest score, so the teacher curved the scores and I ended up with 100%. So this time, when I missed 12 (!) I was a little bummed out. But it was still in the B range, so I wasn't too worried. Well, once again I scored the highest in the class and the teacher curved our scores so that I got a 91%, but then he added 1 more point to make the number of failures less. So I ended up with a 92%. After all that, and I still got the highest score. This teacher lets us grade our tests after we take them to get an idea of what our score is. He was sitting next to me after I had scored it, and asked me how I did. I said I missed 12. He was surprised. He said "You? It must have been a hard test, then, huh." :) It was a hard test. I usually don't do that badly on multiple choice tests.

Ok, this post was really for Mom, who called me today and talked for 8 minutes before my class started. She said I needed to post, so I thought I would. I want to say that Matt had a wonderful time visiting with her in London, and when he gets the pics from the wedding processed, he'll post the pics of Mom and London. So stay tuned! I love you, Mom. Thanks for calling. It was good to hear your voice. And I'm glad Matt could give you a calling card so you could talk to us back home.