Another short week! Another week of valuable learning experiences.

What I am enjoying out of this long practicum experience is that it is never boring. There is never a dull moment when I’m teaching the students. Of course, the enthusiasm and spontaneity of the students is what drives this. The shape of the days are the same, but every day is different! With only a few weeks remaining at Dickens, I am now looking at opportunities to give my own “twist” to things.

Some things I took away this past week:

1. A “catch up” class also requires logistical thinking and planning. It happened during a math class, and I had made piles of unfinished work for the students to complete. I also had a mini board game planned for those who completed their work early. But what ended up happening was several students coming up to me at once while I was handing out unfinished work. It was chaos. I ended up losing track of who was finished, who wasn’t, and who was lost in space. I had a lovely TOC that morning that had suggested I lay out all the unfinished work on the carpet, explain my expectations and have the students search for their own work. This way, I am free to circulate the classroom and not have a never ending lineup before me.

2. Thinking on your feet is part of the job! It’s important to be flexible to schedule changes and lesson plan changes when being a teacher. But when a page is missing from all of your kindergarteners’ printing books, you need to think quick! It was quite comical that this happened when a TOC was in for the day, my first official time leading printing, and the letter of the day was “X.” After barely getting through the printing lesson, a kindergartener had told me that the “X” page was missing. I said, you probably just missed a page! Sure enough, all of the kindy books had the “X” page missing. After a brief sweat of panic, I pulled out the mini whiteboards and had them practicing their printing while I could gather myself together. What a day that was! I’ve become accustomed to this quick thinking but that recent experience really reinforced that.

3. Don’t be afraid of shuffling the students. We had a partner activity for theme between both divisions. Each pair was pre-determined by us; we sat down and purposely paired older learners with younger learners, and even mixed the genders. After reading the list we had compiled, I feared it might be an awkward session of unproductivity and silence. Would these two really be on task? Luckily, our conversation prompts helped the students enormously and I am proud to say that we may have developed some unlikely friendships. I had thought of the idea of mixing the divisions in pairs in response to a recent incident on the playground. There was word going around that someone from division 6 could not play with someone from division 5. We had debunked that to the classes and I hoped this activity would encourage more cross-division activity. There was a lot of positive chatter during the lesson and students found out a lot of similarities and differences about themselves. It was really amazing to watch!