First Day in Kindergarten

Today was my first day at St. John's. I was really nervous on my drive over to Mattoon but I had nothing to be worried about. The teacher, Mrs. Severson is really nice and the kids are great! I'm really glad we did all that phonics work in class before all of this though because the kids all know it like the back of their hands and I would have been completely lost. Today they spent a lot of time on writing words and matching letters to their sounds. They also spent some time with their reading buddies and they finished up the day working on AB patterns. My teacher is going to give me a couple of days to observe and work with the kids individually during their class work times while she does some left over testing from last week. I'll start doing some teaching next week.

I loved a lot of the ways this classroom is managed. All of the kids are under six and a lot are just barely five so it's definitely taken a lot of work to get the kids into as much of a schedule as possible. One of my favorite things we did today was their regular everyday calender time. After doing all of the regular day, month, year routine, they go back through and do it all again in Spanish. They also read colors in English and then recite them in Spanish. It was a really great and easy way to integrate a foreign language into the classroom!

There is a lot expected of these kids but I can see that it isn't too much for them and the teacher never hesitates to take a step back and re-explain a concept. I can't wait to spend some more time observing but I especially can't wait to spend some more time with the kids! Tomorrow we're going on a field trip to a pumpkin patch and right now I'm off to practice my colors in Spanish so I can keep up with the kids in the morning! It seems like most everyone had a great day and I hope you all have a great day tomorrow!