Week 4! 2/22- Medals!

Today was a wonderful day with the 2nd grade. Over the past couple of weeks we have definitely gotten a chance to know the learners pretty well and have started to get what works best. In physical education we went on an imaginary swim around the school, which really was just to tire them out a bit, but they definitely enjoyed it.

After seeing how well Mrs. Jephtha controlled the class last week, we took a page out of her book and made the format of our lesson similar to how she taught her lesson; they responded to this extremely well. For the first time they were able to understand, which then led to them being excited about the simple lesson and being able to participate in it. This was a gratifying moment because the participation signified that they were able to understand us and excited to show us how intelligent they were. This has been my goal from the beginning and made me feel pretty good in achieving it. Now that we know what works, it will be easier to build from there to make our lessons and teach them a lot of cool things.

Later on during our reading period, since we have been loosely focusing on the Olympics the past three weeks in our lessons, we made medals. This activity was fun because we told them that they all deserved medals and they could make the medal for anything that they thought they deserved it in. At first this was a little lost in translation and they just made their medals similar to the one we had made as an example, but eventually turned into what they wanted. After they finished making their medals we called them up one by one to the front to award them their medal. I was wary about this because I was worried that this might take a while and the class might get restless just watching. Although I was worried, we thought it would be cool to give it to them as if they really were winners. We decided to do it, so we called them up to the front, had them stand up on a chair, one of us put their medal around their neck while announcing what they had made their medal for, and everyone clapped. The class loved this. They all were sitting there so excited for their own moment in front of the class and even were respectful after they had received theirs. This was awesome seeing all of their huge smiles lighting up the room. It was also fun to see the learners the rest of the day wearing their medals around school. It was not hard to see the pride that they had taken in their medals and themselves when you saw them. This is an activity that I will definitely remember as something that was pretty cool and I hope their pride will last as long as the memory I will hold of it.