Week 1: Monday

Monday, May 9, 2011; 12-2:50pm

Today was the first day of my internship in Laura James' kindergarden classroom at Kearsarge Regional Elementary School - New London. New London has three kindergarden classes. One is held in the mornings and two take place starting at 12:15 in the afternoon. As the best place to start to learn is through observation, i spent most of today's time observing and taking in my surroundings. The students in the afternoon start off their day with recess while everyone arrives. At 12:15 they come inside and say the pledge of allegiance, have a brief moment of silence and sing a couple of patriotic songs. Afterwards, we did some introductions with names and favorite colors and heard a piece of daily news from each student. This activity was followed by a discussion about letters, which were the hardest to say ond hear and which were the hardest to write. The discussion of letters was followed by washing up for snack, which was interrupted by a chance to watch the kindergarden class across the hall's dry run of their upcoming play, The Little Red Hen. Then it was back to snack time. Durring snack the class talked about their own play with will happen a little later on in May. Snack got a little rowdy, so Mrs. James used a 60 second silence to calm the class down. When snack was finished, a student took her turn at show and tell. She showed us a stuffed animal of hers and told us why it was special to her. Three students were picked at random to ask questions. This was followed by a split into three stations: math, language arts, and some floor play. This class has students of all abilities so each group had a slightly different activity at each station.I started by observing and helping with the Math station with the strongest of the three groups. We used beans to model addition problems. Next, I helped with the language arts station helping three students with their alphabet. We used different hand motions as we said the alphabet up to G. After this, we worked to put an alphabet caterpillar puzzel together. Once the puzzel was together it was time for me to leave. I enjoyed my day in the classroom and am looking forward to day 2, and then next couple of weeks.