Final Day

The end of the semester and last of my visits came. I wish there had been more time in this last semester, so that I could have taught these children more. There were two things I did not get two that I wish I had. One was capitalization and punctuation and the other was the central message of the story. Upon reflection, I probably should have done the central message lesson for the last day, but originally when I planned this out with Mrs. Quick we decided to do a Jewish dance, because of their Holidays Around the World thing. So, that's what I did. First I told them a little about Jewish clothing and the reason they dance barefoot. Then I taught them the dance. I made the dance a little harder, because I thought they could handle it. However, it turns out that grapevines are actually a bit too hard for most of them. So, I made some adjustments and the dance turned out to be almost the same thing I had before. Kori, my mentor, was there for this last visit and gave good advice. She said that it can be difficult to teach children at this age folk/traditional dances, but something you can do is take aspects of that style and allow them to explore those movements. For example, some Jewish dances tend to be bouncy and light on their feet. And because their clothing permitted it, their movement tends to be bigger than you would see in other countries. So, something I could have done would have been to allow them to explore bouncy and light movement, while the movement is still big. Then, we could have either made a dance together, or allowed them to improvise for each other and see what things their classmates observed. Since Kori was there, I had them do the Gingerbread Man story one more time to show her. The kids had fun with that. :) And that ended my experience with Mrs. Quick's 1st grade class. I learned a lot and wish I could try it again. There are somethings I would have changed, but overall I gained a lot of good experience of what kinds of things work and what does not. This is really a great program! It allows the growth of everyone involved and I would like to think that I have become a bit better of a teacher because of it. I also hope that the teacher I worked with, Mrs. Quick, has gained some good ideas that she can use in her teaching in the future.