Friday January 19

Well, it’s the end of the second week and things are going good. These last couple of days have been kind of crazy at the school because we’ve gotten snow in Duns, which doesn’t happen too often. Yesterday, many of the kids weren’t able to make it into school because of this weather. However, things carried on. The P7's continued to work on their Shakespeare projects. For language, they have been heavily focusing on creative writing and what elements make a good creative piece. On Wednesday they worked on character development. We had the students watch short clips of movies and focus on the characters and what characteristics they possess. We also have been practicing writing good beginnings that draw a reader to the piece of writing. I was surprised at many of the students’ writing. It was amazing. Yesterday we began talking a little about Chaucer and read a shortened version of one of his stories. On Wednesday we started our pen pal project. We first reviewed what goes into a friendly letter and then brain-stormed some ideas to write about. Because the school we’re writing to only has 17 students and we have 30 we had to partner up. This was a challenge because this class has a lot of trouble working with each other. Once partnered up they had to write their letters and then show me or Mrs. Higson, just to check for punctuation and grammar. Yesterday, we then went to the computer suite and began typing up our letters. We didn’t get very far, however, because as I was walking around looking at various emails, most of the students resorted back to run-on sentences, no punctuation, and not capitalizing the first letter of a sentence or proper nouns. This was definitely something that I didn’t think we would have a problem with because we had gone over correcting grammar and punctuation the day before. I also assumed since they were in P7 they would know to do these things. I didn’t think it was right to send these emails with all these mistakes so we will be going over them again in the next couple of days. Along with this, we’ve been continuing to learn about Wisconsin and I was very impressed at how much the students were interested and how much they actually researched on their own. It was great to see this. We have also been continuing with maths. We’re slowing down again a little because I found out this week that many of them have difficulties multiplying and dividing, and they are still struggling with telling time. These are things that I feel that when they go to High School next year they will have to know so I don’t want to move along too quickly until they are confident with it. A couple of the students truly do not understand, while the others I fee just do not want to put in the time.
This week has definitely been a very interesting and eye-opening one, but has taught me a lot. It gives me the opportunity to deal with problems that happen in every school. It also gives me the opportunity to develop better lessons in which to fit the needs of the students. I feel that next week will be a very challenging but very educational week for myself.
On Saturday, Kim and I will be traveling to Edinburgh for the day. We plan on climbing up to the castle since we weren’t able to on the last trip. Sunday I plan to go to church and plan for the upcoming week!