Tomorrow is my last day teaching at Dromclough. I can't believe how close Christmas is and I am so excited to be going home just in time for Christmas Eve! I am leaving on Friday morning and have already started packing up my things. I will definitely miss working with some of the nicest people I have ever met! The staff at Dromclough has been so wonderful to me and I will definitely miss that. Overall, I had a great experience teaching the junior infants. It's been a very good learning experience for me and I've grown a great deal as a teacher because of it. At times it was definitely challenging teaching so many young children by myself, but I'm glad that I had this opportunity. It helped me become better at a lot of important aspects of teaching such as time and classroom management, being patient, adapting new plans at the last minute, multi-tasking, effectively using my "teacher voice," settling issues between students, and finding different ways to engage students instead of using the same one or two ways. I think I'll always be learning better ways to do things as a teacher, but I'm glad that I could learn so much just from this placement alone.

Just to quickly some up my weekend, the 4th class teacher invited me to her wedding which was on Saturday. It was really lovely. The 3rd, 4th, and 5th classes all sang choir music during the church service and they did a great job. They sounded amazing! It was the first Irish wedding I had ever been to so that was pretty cool :) 

This week in school, we have been squeezing in a lot of work before Christmas break. But there has also been time for a few fun activities as well. On Monday, the school invited a magician to come and put on a magic show for the kids and they all had a blast! On Tuesday, the junior and senior infants, 1st class, and 2nd class all went to the Listowel Cinema to watch the movie Arthur Christmas. It was such a great movie, and I think the kids really enjoyed it as well. Tomorrow we will be having a Christmas party towards the last part of the day which should be lots of fun! It will be bittersweet leaving Dromclough and Ireland: I'm sad to be leaving the company of such wonderful people but I'm also really looking forward to going home again and getting a chance to teach the 3rd graders for a few more weeks :) 

Here are a few pictures: One is from the wedding, a couple are from a math activity we did making patterns with manipulatives that somehow turned into garland for the classroom Christmas tree haha, and finally some examples of the hand print Christmas trees we made.