Tuesday, January 16

It’s the beginning of the second week of school and things are going very well. Yesterday I started a small unit on Wisconsin. I think it’s going to be a lot of fun. For the first day we went to the computer suite and just did a lot of searches. I had them first find Wisconsin on a United States map, then Madison, Milwaukee, Green Bay, and then finally Grafton. Many of them were even ambitious enough to find my street on a city map. Today we continued in the computer suite and I had them find some interesting facts about Wisconsin and then they had to find a picture of the fact that they liked the most and write a short summary of it. We are then going to make a Wisconsin bulletin board and post these on that. I also brought in a bunch of pictures of my family, friends, and other various activities that I have participated in. They just loved this and of course had a ton of questions. In the next couple of days we are going to start writing to pen pals from my old grade school. They are also very excited about this and have already come up with a ton of questions to ask them. On top of this all, the P7 class is continuing to work on Shakespeare and we’re going to be starting Chaucer in the next few days. I’m still working with my math group as well. Yesterday we continued to work on the time. I had some of the students be the “teacher” and come up with some problems to ask the rest of the group. They really liked this and I thought it was important because many students do learn best when hearing it from their peers. I also had the opportunity this morning to go and observe and help out in the nursery (4 year olds). It was a lot of fun and I found many similarities to the Preschool back on St. Norbert campus.
I’m really enjoying my time here and have already gained so much from this experience. I am getting a little homesick but I’ve kept in contact through phone calls and emails. Kim and I went to Glasgow this last weekend. It was a lot of fun except the weather didn’t want to cooperate. It rained all weekend, but I guess it’s what we expected. We’re continuing to work on our London trip and hope to get that all worked out this week.