Week four: facetime

It finally happened. Face time with all the kids at all the schools. Sure there were problems with schedules and sure my one schedule was changed ten times in the course of two days, but hey. Sometimes you have to roll with it. If we can find two more people, there will ev two more AneriCorps folks running around (yay!) which means schedules will probably change again (yoi!)

The kids (and some of the teachers) are still trying to learn my name, and I'm trying to remember all of theirs! 

 

Brock the Badly Behaved Bear going to school in his brow shoes and black pants and brown coat with the blue and black collar. 

 My schedule. After and before and after again.

Sorting kindergarten sight words and making a nice box for them... and discovering there weren't really any kindergarten sight words in the box anyway. 

Week three ... Settling in

This week there was some actual face time with students at Northwestern. I tacked up my Horton Hears a Who stuff in my little corner and when it became clear there would be some behavior issues, created some Horton sticker charts. The minion stickers are already a big hit.
Our schedules have us bouncing from building to building, so sometimes it's hard to remember what happened when. Second grade had a fun math day with fall related math games [we're practicing rolling a dice and finding doubles on a mat] Kindergarten had some phonics fun looking for the letters of their names on the floor and telling me the sounds before they put them on the board ledge. One friend needed a little more help with spelling than others... And in another kindergarten class, we practiced reading the letter of the week book, Mm, and talking about yummmmmmy things to eat.

 Springfield had a few more hiccoughs with the schedule than anticipated, and we're not there as many days. During some lag time I created a READ banner out of hand cut and laminated letters and improvised calendar pictures of children's book illustrations. Looking at it in the picture, I'm thinking I should switch the letter order so it reads back of the room to front.

The last word

This guy had me in stitches. The last page of the kindergarten Mm book was to draw a picture of themselves eating their favorite meal. I could pretty well tell what some of the other kiddos were doing because they asked what X food looked like but this guy was quietly doing his thing.

I had to ask what the red thing was...

 Bacon, of course! It's my favorite food!

Week two: Schedule, schedule, schedule

Out first full week at our host sites. Northwestern Elementary had experienced an unfortunate incident with one of their air conditionder condensers... that's the crane lifting it into place. It took a couple of weeks to resolve that issue, and most of the building, with the exception of the office, library and our room, which happened to be the old computer lab attached to the library, and thus on the same HVAC system, remained cool while everything else melted was quite warm.

When I wasn't trying to figure out where I was going or who I was trying to find or which student I was supposed to be testing there was a lot of material to review and make; CVC cards and mats, alphabet cards, clip cards... we could purchase all of these things and save ourselves a ton of hastle but we don't have a budget to work with and we don't have much of an income to speak of, so if we can't borrow the materials, we are making them. Thank goodness for Pinterest and TeachersPayTeachers.

I know a woman who used to teach kindergarten at Northwestern, I suspect the giant plastic tub these letters came out of are entirely her doing.  Thank you, Mary.

week one: trainings and meet'n'greet!

Training! We had three days of training in Clarion before our official start week of service after Labor day. We woke up to some beautiful mornings. And we learned a looooooot of stuff.

Friday wasn't an official work day, but it was a good opportunity to visit the host sight, say hello, check out

 the room...

 

And then find out I wrote one 1 instead of two 1's for an appointment. oops. So, seize the opportunity. And ... get a little lost finding hose site two...

And saw this unusual train thing...

Mostly ready for Tuesday.