Proud Moments in Education

Today in my preschool class we were planning one of our units. Our group came up with a pretty wicked plan!! I'm pretty excited. Our professor said this was similar to student teaching. There was so much to plan!!! As we were planning I started to have a thought: a few years ago I never thought I could have done any of this. I remember a time where I was told there was no way in hell I could ever teach...or even be with children. They told me I was "biologically" unfit to teach. (I was also told by the head of the Education Department that it was impossible for me be an organist because no organist is under the age of 50...whatever!)

Well, that was years ago. Water under the damn. Now I'm at SNC. And I learned...and boy did I learn!!!

There are times when I really have some great teaching experiences. These experiences make me smile. They remind me that I am in fact, learning something from the great Saint Norbert College.

Today was one of those days... I am a Spanish teacher at Martin Elementary (for this semester at least!) I have 5 great kids...some in 1st and some in 2nd grade. Today we learned about clothing. We learned a few clothing words and then we wrote them down on their index cards. Then the real fun beings!!

We went outside and trace our bodies on the sidewalk. Then we labeled all of our articles of clothing in Spanish. It was pretty interesting to see the children work because I couldn't touch the chalk. I'm allergic to chalk so I got to supervise the kids instead. They teased me about not being able to touch the chalk, but such is life right? Here's a picture of one of the bodies!


The kids loved it! They kept on saying how much fun they had. One of the girls did not want to stop working on their person. I had to drag them inside. Once they got inside we did a math connection: we made a pictoral graph of the things we wore.

One of the boys told me he was glad we were using math with Spanish. Math is one of his favorite subjects. It was also the first time I got to use my pocket chart ($1.00 at Target)

Another really great moment in my teaching came Monday. I taught preschool. I did a skeleton activity. I cut out 22 puzzle pieces and hid them around the room.

Thanks to Sharon, I found the perfect book to go with it as well! I wanted to focus on what skeletons were and not just some random story about a skeleton living in the world. I used brass fasteners to model the joints and the white tag board as the bones.

There are so many more ideas that I had that worked very well. Such as:


The "I Have a Dream Quilt" Lesson plan (also thought up by Noelle...we taught this lesson in New Orleans!)
My VBS Classroom over the past summer! Everybody thought the room was awesome!
I feel that I've come a long way since I started college how many years ago. I went from the supposed: "biologically unfit person that lies about being a church organist," to a teacher. Who would have thought?

Thanks SNC

Em

Hello, Hello, Remember Me? I'm Everything You Can't Control

So many of my friends insist that I write a book one day...


So why not now?

My return to blog-land ended with my knitting blog (too much upkeep) and started with this new blog: Not Your Average Jane. I decided sometime ago that my life is way too interesting to not write down. And besides, this is a better way to share with friends and family some of the crazy and fun stuff that I do.

So today's entry is going to be about my long weekend trip. These long weekend trips do NOT happen very often. This is because I work at 2 churches--both that schedule me normally every weekend. (Hopefully it's because they love me!) So with some talking with the powers at hand, the divine miracle of me not working a single job for an entire weekend was able to happen:)

So what did I do since I didn't play a single mass? WELL... I had the pleasure to go to Washington Island with Leah Allen.


But of coarse when we go up to Door County, we don't just drive straight to the tip...nope...instead we taste some wineries on the way! I happen to be madly in love with wine. I ended up purchasing several bottles for my wine collection including some Warm Door County Winter Wine.

Right before we got to the island, Leah and I stopped and had a lovely picnic at Newton State Park, where we had a healthy and yummy lunch, made my Leah. The scenery was beautiful, but we didn't have enough time to stay around, otherwise we would have missed the ferry:(

We had fruit, veggies, cheese (the good kind), yogurt and some fudge for lunch. We tried to find bread to go with our cheese, but we discovered that there is NO PLACE TO BUY FRESH BREAD IN DOOR COUNTY! What the heck!? We went into 4 bakeries and none of them sold fresh bread!!! Our question is where does everybody get their bread in Door County?!?! (Seriously, we want to know!)

When we finally got to the island, we rode bikes.

We ended up biking for about 8 miles! After that, we enjoyed a nice scenic view of the forest on one of the nature trails. Leah read some poetry. It was one of those moments where you didn't want to leave.

That's all for now...more adventures to come!

E