Thursday, January 7

I have quite a few free periods on Thursdays which was nice to plan for next week and get organized in my classroom. Hilary helped me out in the morning because Mrs. Lopez didn’t have any social studies classes; it was great having her there to give me help. In science we learned about water so I did a demonstration with kids with pairs of hydrogen atoms together with one atom of oxygen. I think visuals are a good thing and I want to do them more often in my class instead of just always copying down notes, but my kids were so talkative when I was trying to explain the demonstration to them. So we’ll keep trying a few more times with demonstrations if it helps them remember better. I’m really behind in Language and I don’t know what to do to catch up or go any faster. The English Language and grammar is hard to learn if you’re a native speaker sometimes, much more when it’s your second language. So it takes me that much longer to explain things because I want to make sure they understand the material; many times one lesson has to be split into two. We had tutorias after school today and Hilary was there to help; she took my reading kids and I did stuff with the language kids. We came back home, relaxed, talked and joked around. Julia recently moved up to Villa Verde as well, so it’s awesome to have all of us girls in the same place; we can talk and hang out together more frequently.