My Third Visit...

On Tuesday morning I left my house a little after 9, which would give me just the right amount of time to make it to my elementary school. This, unfortunately, did not go as planned. As I drove on the highway I soon encountered 5 mile per hour traffic; I am suppose to be driving 55 miles per hour and soon realized I was going to be late. This made me really nervous, but I took out my cell phone and told Thanh to tell Mrs. Smith I would be late and felt a little better. I finally arrived at the school at 9:45 and had to ring the doorbell twice in order to get in. Luckily, we don't start seeing our students until 10:00. I signed into the office and took the now familiar route down to Mrs. Smith's classroom. When I got there, the other volunteers were discussing what poems we would be reading and I found out that we would only be doing the poem and sight word activity when we tutored. This was because Mrs. Smith wanted our students to really be able to recognize these sight words quickly. This bothered me a little. I want my students to be able to recognize these words, however, doing those same two activities each week gets boring for the students. We are able to change the poem, which does help keep interest, however, the students do get bored with the sight word activity and it really shows at some points.

When I walked into Room 14, Jared, Billy, and Sarah were all sitting at our table by the window. They were excited to see me and I was excited to see them. This time, the students got me a bigger chair so that I would fit more comfortably at the table. They were so excited to tell me, it was really sweet. We started off with the poem, "Little Miss Muffet," which they all thought was funny. We did a rhyming activity and a word pairing activity that all the students did well on. Then I asked them to identify upper case and lower case letters (such as Aa) throughout the poem and they did really well with that. After the poem, we worked on sight words. Sarah wasn't too excited and Billy and Jared were excited but mostly about tossing the dice I think. They still struggled with creating sentences, however, they did very well recognizing the words (some were: come, for, and). In the middle of our tutoring the four of us to a trip to Room 24 because Mrs. Smith thought I was suppose to be in that room. It was mixed up because one of the volunteers did not show up. It was a nice break for Sarah, Billy, and Jared to take a walk. At the end of our session Sarah helped me clean up and because of this I gave her a paper feather, which represents money for the school store at this school. She was really excited; I then said my goodbyes and walked back to Mrs. Smith's room.

In Mrs. Smith's room we filled out our logs and behavior sheets on each of our students. Then, we talked about how as volunteers we need to be strict with our students and let them know when they are doing something wrong (behaviorally). I felt I was lucky with the three students I got because they all listened very well. After we discussed that, we signed out at the office and walked to our cars. I'm excited to go back next week and continue to see the progress my students make.