Today in The Learning Academy was the last real day that we would be spending with the children. This was our last day of a full observation before the end of the semester and I'm very surprised at how fast 12 weeks went by.
When I walked into the classroom this morning, it started off great. All of the students were excited to see me and it was very heart warming. I had 4 or 5 students come up to me and tell me different stories about themselves and their lives and they were genuinley excited to see me and it reassured me that I was in the right profession. One student came up to me and showed me a picture of her with her dogs in front of their Christmas tree. Another student told me about a cat that they are fostering and a story that her and another student wrote. She asked if I could read the story and tell her what I thought and I was very impressed on how long the story was. It was easily 15 pages long that the students had hand wrote and drew pictures. Another student told me about a book about a dog and how it is a movie. He said that he saw the movie and loved it so much that he was inspired to read the book. Lastly, another student and I talked about how we had the same birthday.
The kids started off the day with their journal. I noticed that Ms. Swan decorated the classroom and had actually put up a Christmas tree. I found this very interesting and actually questioned if she was allowed to do that because of the laws and rules that educators have to follow but then I remembered that The Learning Academy is a private school and affiliated with the college so it is okay to express a religion. She also changed her holiday book section to Christmas themed and I was very excited. Then Ms. Swan told the class that there was a group of 28 people coming to observe the classroom and how she teaches them OG so the kids spent half an hour cleaning up the classroom and their desks and cubbys. The children tend to take on Ms. Swan's energy that day and because she gets worked up easily, the students became very worked up very fast. Once the group finally arrived the students seemed to calm down because Ms. Swan became less nervous. They used their green, white and blue papers that they created the week before to show which ending they thought the word went with. Then they played sparkle with words that related to the lesson that they had just learned and the kids had a ton of fun. They were a little rambuncious but the kids enjoyed being able to use a ball and throw it to each other to determine who would go next.
There was one student, Max, who continued to get into arguments with the other students and each time he would automatically be blamed for causing the problem. What I didn't like about this was that Ms. Swan never actually saw what happened but because Max has a record of being the trouble maker, he would automatically get blamed. He was visibly upset that Ms. Swan didn't believe him and I know that it is difficult not to categorize and take the easy way out and blame the trouble maker student, but I felt bad for him.
Afterwards, the students ate snack and then moved onto their math lesson. I helped Ms. Swan upload some files from her phone to her laptop and she was very excited because she needed it for her doctorate class. Then it was time for Tia and I to leave so we weren't able to work with our students today. I do plan on giving him the primary spelling inventory test again next week to chart his progress over the last 12 weeks.