Finally!

Sorry for the lack of posts....

The past two or three weeks were hectic (I barely had time to complete and turn in my MAT application) and I did get ANY word on my placement until last week-and apparently, it was misinformation...

I was going to be in a classroom where I would be working with 7 English Language Learners (ELLs). This would be a great opportunity to get some really in depth information about teaching them, but I was put in a class that up until last week (after I was scheduled) only had 1 ELL; there are 2 now.

I went into the school on Wednesday, around 1230 and asked where I was supposed to go, and the vice principal came by and talked to me, saying that she was told that I was not supposed to show up until middle to late October, and that I would only be coming in for 3-4 weeks to purely observe the students. I informed her that this was not what I was planning on being signed up for, and gave her my plans for this Independent Study, which she seemed excited about.

Coming in early was not an issue to the teacher, She introduced me to the classroom and told me that their schedule was weird because they had a 2 hour early dismissal. They had just finished watching James and the Giant Peach after a unit of reading the book with the rest of the 5th grade class. They had been asked to fill out a worksheet with columns for each sense and observe the fruit in these terms. They were then asked to start writing a story about a peach using the descriptions that they had written down.

The ELL students, a girl and a boy, did not seem to have a problem with doing any of the assignments. The girl finished faster than everyone and then just sort of looked around, while the boy (the student who had just transferred in from another MD county) was distracted on a couple of occasions, and talked with the students surrounding him. He seemed to be in a very good mood, and had multiple positive interactions with his classmates.

I would have thought that perhaps just coming from a new school system, he would not be able to make friends as easily. I know I would not have, even as a native English speaker.

I was only at the placement for an hour and a half, and most of that was waiting around for the right administration. I will update in a couple of days, and hopefully everything will work out a lot better and I will have enough information to write a decent blog post.