Day Two with the Kindergarteners

Today was my second day working with the kindergarteners at TJ again, and it was a really fun day. Again, you can tell it's getting close to the end of the year because the kids are so antsy, but the teachers don't stop teaching just because school is almost over; the kids will be learning new concepts and reviewing old ones right up until the last day.

Today, the kids did some warm up songs in the morning to review the alphabet before reading time. There was still some end of the year testing going on, but Ms. Caraballo went back to the normal routine of reading groups for the day. There are three different groups and one group will be reading letters with Ms. Caraballo, another group doing a project with me at the back table, and another group split between doing ESL activities on the computer  and finishing up worksheets at their seats. The group working with me today was putting together a book about the letter L because we're continuing our review of the letters.

Later in the day, for math, we introduced the new concept of math mountains to the kids. The way it works is, there is a picture of a triangle, "the mountain", with a big number on top, and a smaller number with a matching number of circles on one of the sides. The other side was blank and the students were supposed to figure out how many more circles you needed to add to the other side to get the big number on top. A lot of the students had a really hard time with the worksheet we did, especially with the bigger numbers, so Ms. Caraballo and I needed to work individually with many of the students. Next week, we'll probably do the lesson again with counting cubes to help many of the students who had a hard time visualize the process of addition.

Today was another lesson in patience and repetition when dealing with ESL students, but I loved having the chance to work with all of them and am excited for next week! Today was also a treat because I got to watch the kids practice their graduation song, "The World is a Rainbow", in music class and it was adorable. I'm very excited for the treats of next week!