Back Into the Swing Of Things

This week marks my fourth week of student teaching already and time is just flying by. Last week I got to do some traveling around Ireland with my mom while it was Dromclough's fall break. We had such a blast!! We left Listowel and headed towards Killarney to scope out the city and marketplace there. The next day we went to tour the Dingle Peninsula and ran into some very heavy fog on our way back to Killarney. The third day we met with my dad's cousins and traveled with them back to Cork. We got to meet with three of my dad's cousins, Mary, Kevin, and Paul and Paul's wife Anne. It was so great to see them again. Last time I saw them was about 4 years ago during our last family vacation. We got to catch up and talk about some family history. It was very fun! We stayed in Cork overnight and then headed to Adare. We saw some of Adare and it was a very charming little town. Then from Adare we left for Limerick and toured St. Mary's Cathedral and took pictures of King Charles' Castle. From Limerick, we traveled up to Bunratty Castle and toured the castle and the mock village. It was pretty interesting, there were tons of spiral staircases in the castle that never seemed to end. There were more and more stories to climb inside the castle, it was pretty amazing. Definitely a good workout lol. Lastly, we went to see the Cliffs of Moher and it was a perfect day for it. The weather was very calm and the sun was out, I was so happy! We came back to Listowel on Friday so my mom could get to know my host family better and we had a really delicious dinner together. On Saturday, I took my mom around Listowel and then we got in the car and drove 10 minutes to the town of Lixnaw which is the town where my grandpa on my dad's side of the family originated. Lastly, we went to Ballybunion and I showed my mom where I took my first batch of pictures the first weekend I arrived in Ireland. We also went to see Ballybunion Golf Course which is a very popular course over here. By Saturday night, my mom had to head back to Limerick to be closer to the Shannon airport for her flight on Sunday morning.

Today was the first science lesson I did in the junior infants classroom and it went very well. Science is only once a week so I won't get to teach another lesson until next week, unfortunately. But the students were very engaged during my lesson about hard and soft materials. We did an I-Spy game so that students could identify hard and soft things in the classroom and practice distinguishing between the two properties.

In maths, the students are working on identifying differences in the sizes and overall number of objects shown. Today, we covered the differences in objects' sizes and I had  groups of three students come up at a time to the front on the room while the rest of the class told me who the biggest (tallest) person was and who the littlest (shortest) person was, and which child should go in the middle so that it went shortest to tallest. Then they had a worksheet to complete where they were to color the biggest object in a group of three similar objects. The students did a great job completing this worksheet correctly. Tomorrow I plan on having three clear containers full of items and having the students tell me which container holds the most objects and which container holds the least amount. Then, we will look around the room and find similar objects that we can compare for sizes/quantity. If I see that the students have a good grasp of this concept, I will try asking some students to tell me some examples that they see around the classroom on their own.

Ps. I posted all of the pictures from last week under a separate page titled "Photos" which is located at the top of my blog, underneath the title and next to the "Home" page.