Coming to a Close

This morning I realized that we only have 4 weeks left of school.  I can't' believe that in a month, I may never see some of these kids again.  They are definitely feeling the end of the year because they've started to go NUTS!  It takes everything in me to not go ballistic everyday.  Although it seems like I do a lot more yelling these days.  The end of this week was a little more controlled because they finally realized that I was serious in my rantings.  I took away probably close to 25 Bee Bucks in the last two days alone and right before our class auction.

I don't think I ever shared on here that I had my interview with Michele!  We met on a Friday after school about 2 weeks ago and she asked me a few questions.  Then she called references and within about 2 hours, she came back to my room to officially offer me the position!  I will now be teaching 3rd grade at Southland in the Chinese Immersion program.  My roommate and fellow intern, Jessica, speaks Chinese and has been hired as the 3rd grade Chinese teacher.  So we will be working together again next year.  Jessica is only allowed to talk with the students in Chinese, so a lot of the responsibility of management and discipline will fall back on me.  She is also teaching math, science, and social studies completely in Chinese.  I will be teaching some of the vocab to go along with that but mostly, I will focus on the language arts (i.e. reading, writing, spelling).  There are two classes and so we will switch groups halfway through the day which means that while I have 1/2 the planning, I will have twice as many students.  Because of the intensity of the program, there can be no new students added to our classes which means we already know who will be in our class and can start planning for numbers.  Its looking like about 40-41 students that we will share next year.

On Thursday this week, I met with Joy, Jennifer, and Michele to have my final Exit interview for my internship.  They averaged my scores from the whole year and out of 5 my score was a 4.5 from Joy and a 4.6 from Jennifer.  Not bad!  They also both wrote letters of recommendation that I can use when looking for future employment.  After that meeting, I went to another meeting but this one was with the 2nd grade Chinese Immersion english teacher.  She gave me some insight into how things work, how to do the switching of classes, tips on how to handle certain things and was able to answer a lot of my questions.  I was feeling pretty overwhelmed because I had absolutely no idea where to start planning for next year but I'm way excited now.  This is a completely different kind of planning than I had to do for this last year because now I have some very specific requirements and have to do everything in tandem with another teacher.  It will be an interesting experience, but I'm glad that I'm doing this with Jessica.  We both work well together and we are new enough teachers that one can't boss the other around and dominant the partnership.

I'm looking forward to the many new adventures ahead of me!  Wish me luck!


P.S.  Here's a look into a few things I'm hoping to do next year in my classroom.  I'm thinking I might do an OWL theme.  Still not 100% sure but I'm really liking it at this point.

O - Outstanding
W - Wise
L - Learner

Check out my Pinterest page to see some of the great things I've found!  http://pinterest.com/beckaw/classroom-ideas/