The beginning!

A friend of mine started a blog about her internship experiences. I thought it was a great idea...so I decided to steal the idea!

Let me begin with the basics of my internship. I'm in a 3rd grade inclusion (a typical class w/ a couple of ESE kids in it) at Holiday Hill Elementary (its a 9 minute car ride from my house!!). My directing teacher is Mrs. Micki Steven's (she's awesome...and will refer to her in future posts as my DT). My class is in a co-teach situation. My DT teaches reading and writing (literacy stuff) and the co-teacher (Ms. Jackie Sorci) teaches math, science, and social studies. They have 2 separate classrooms and their 2 homerooms switch between the 2 rooms. I have a total of 44 kids (YIKES!), but its a great experience!

My internship started last Monday (aug. 24) with orientation at UNF for 3 days (it was torture!). Then I started at Holiday Hill on Thursday (aug. 27). My first week is spent in observation mode, which means NO TEACHING! I have been observing the day to day routines and stuff like that, but I have also been helping with some other stuff too.

My first experience as a teacher was doing "conferences" with the students. They are learning how to write friendly letters. My homeroom class already knows how to write these so their only issues were basically spelling and some sentence structure stuff..nothing too terrible. My other class is another story. They had just learned how to write a friendly letter....and a good majority of them were pretty bad!

On Friday I got to do car line by myself...this was an experience since I don't really know the kids that well (let alone even remembering their names!) nor do I know their parents (we haven't had open house yet...its on Sept. 3rd).

My supervisor is coming to the school sometime this week to meet me and my DT as well as setting up dates for my 4 formal observations and also dates for seminars that I need to attend. I'll get more into detail later about the formal observations and what they are.

Well that's about all the interesting stuff that happened during my first two days at HHE. I'm gonna try to post at least once a week.