Mixing it Up

One of the first grade teachers was absent today, so the principal came and asked me if I could help out in that classroom during their math period. Come to find out, my school does not get substitute teachers??!! I guess if the classroom has an assistant, then the assistant takes over for the day. Works out well if the assistant is also a trained teacher like today, however I imagine that would be tough in some circumstances. It seems like the other teachers just rally to help the classroom with the absent teacher. They did not call me in to be in charge, but just to help out the assistant who is a trained high school teacher. She was teaching math to 23 kids and being that they are all at different levels and always wave their hands in the air for help, they thought it would be good to give her an extra set of hands!

It was really fun to be back with that age group and I had a really good time working with a few of the kiddos. They were working on finding the missing addends by counting on their fingers, yet that became quite tricky when the sum increased to 20 and they no longer had enough fingers! We used the number lines on their desk and I told them to pretend their finger was a little frog and we counted how many times the frog had to jump to get from the addend that we knew to the sum of 20.

At one point when she was first introducing the lesson, the TA allowed 6 kids to leave for the bathroom at once. I thought to myself, is she kidding....those kids are going to be gone at least 10 minutes! I sat there somewhat smugly thinking that I just knew first graders better than her and allowing that many kids at once was a recipe for disaster. Color me surprised when a few minutes (a completely reasonable amount of time later) the kids trickled back in one at a time and sat back down. That never would have happened with my group last year. One at a time was it or else there were parties in the bathroom including soap fights, shared stalls, and wall climbing (seriously kids got caught doing all of those things last year). I was so proud of those little kiddos for doing the right thing and not abusing the privilege.

After a 45 minute period with the first graders, I went back to third grade and taught two small groups about regrouping. The teachers had used a really great color coded strategy to demonstrate for the kids and I was in charge of helping 8 who did not do their homework correctly. It can be a bit of a challenge to teach something on the spot without any mental or material preparation, but I think it went really well. The kids seemed to get it and completed their problems correctly.

I had to stay a little longer today because I was out yesterday spending the entire day at my new apartment with the Ikea delivery men. They arrived around 9 am and my husband and I did not get back to our hotel until almost 9 pm because it took them that long to assemble our two new wardrobes and my new desk. It was a long day, but thankfully our internet got installed in the morning so we could check email and I could read some blogs during the long wait.

On the job front, I emailed the director of the school about the position because the application deadline was yesterday. His response was that they will do interviews next week once they get some logistics figured out. I have no idea if there are other candidates, but I am so anxious to at least have an interview so I can tell them how excited I would be to get the job and what a great match it is for my background (ya gotta toot your own horn in situations like that)!