Student Teaching...

Student teaching has honestly been the greatest experience of my college career. I am student teaching in the 1st grade with 17 kids - 10 boys and 7 girls. They are the BEST class ever! Such good listeners, and always working their hardest! For the most part, they are all on the same level...which makes it pretty easy. I am also working with an AWESOME teacher who is so good at her job and I feel soooo lucky to have her as my cooperating teacher! I have learned SO much from her and I am so grateful that this has been such an amazing experience! There is only a month left (I can't believe it has gone by so fast!) and I am sad to leave those kids. But I am definitely coming out a much better teacher thanks to the wonderful Mrs.Clovis. First grade is awesome and if I had my choice, that is the grade that I would LOVE to teach! I love it so much because we can have fun themed days and the students don't think they are stupid. Halloween has been SO much fun in the first grade! I am so excited for this week because every day we are doing something fun with Halloween. Last week we had a skeleton day and a spider day. This week it's scary stories, bats, monsters, and the halloween party and parade and carnival...SO much fun!
These are some fun things that we (all Mrs.Clovis' idea) have done on the walls outside the classroom.
We had the students make trees with the _all ending words on the leaves. The tree trunk and branches were made out of a brown paper bag. It was so much fun and the kids loved it! Then we went outside and played in the leaves (the kids had a BLAST doing that!) and made a pile and took a picture of each kid in the pile. Then Mrs.Clovis made their pictures into cute leaves and made this:
This was fun for the little ones! We made puzzle pumpkins. This could be fun for kids up to 3rd grade I think. I loved watching the ideas each of them came up with. It turned out SO cute!
This is my FAVORITE!!!! Since I am teaching all day now, Mrs.Clovis is finding some other things to do (I pretty much took over the class a few weeks ago...oops?) and this was one of the things that she did one day. She made a haunted house and tree, took pictures of each of the kids making different poses, cut them out, and put them all over this haunted house! It turned out SO cute and the kids loved trying to find themselves on the house. I love this idea and I am definitely going to use it when I am a teacher!
This was my first math lesson, and it actually turned out really good! These are lady bug sums. It turned out cute and I love it! Definitely another one that I am going to do with my class.
I am sad to see it coming to an end, but at the same time it will be nice to sleep in for a while. I have to wake up around 5:30, that is if I don't want breakfast, and leave at 6:30 to drive an hour to Blackfoot. So not driving that hour EVERY day is going to be nice. And I would dread it every day if the kids weren't as awesome as they are. But they are awesome and I love them! I hope that when I am a teacher, my kids end up being just as amazing as the 17 that I have right now!