I am currently about halfway through my internship and I absolutely love it. My project has been to teach writing lessons to the students nearly every day and unfortunately since my mentor’s schedule has been so full of other lessons I didn’t get to start until Friday the 20th. So on Friday I gave them very little instruction and told them to write as much as possible about their favorite animal; I did not let them use their I-pads for any reason because I wanted to see what they knew on their own. I already knew they would need more instructions but what some of them had written was more advanced than I would have thought. Today I gave a lesson on “there, they’re, and there”which was something that I knew they needed a lot of work on based off what they had written on Friday. Their prompt today was “What would you do if there was no rules for a day?” Along with answering the prompt they had to include there/they’re/their at least once, have at least five sentences per paragraph, at least three paragraphs. I always tell them spelling doesn’t matter because I don’t want them to spend ten minutes looking at their I-pads. Today they had between twenty and thirty minutes to finish but most only made it to two paragraphs. I also made a mistake in my teaching and didn’t clarify that “there” can be used in a couple different ways but otherwise their writing was better than on Friday. My goal is that by the end of next week I will be able to compare the very first thing they wrote and the very last thing they wrote and there will be a noticeable difference in the fact that they are better written and using the correct forms of words. When I first started this project I was going to include a small science lesson but I decided to not do that because the rain will not allow it and because I wanted to keep my project focused on one thing rather than it all being english then some random science bit that has nothing to do with it. While working on my project and with the kids in general I have learned that I have a lot more patience than I ever thought, I can be in front of a room and not get a ton of anxiety about talking, and that teaching is definitely the job I want. Being here at my internship and teaching is an experience I will never forget because the kids were absolutely amazing. The biggest learning experience I’ve gotten out of this is working with children who are in general ed but shouldn’t be and working with kids who are going to argue with me about pretty much everything that I say. Overall I’ve really learned to have a lot of patience and to be able to put my foot down which was and is something that I still struggle with in everyday life.
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