Busy. All the time.

I haven't posted in a while, probably because things have gotten busy around here. Let me fill you all in...

I have gotten to know all the students' names, which is saying something because I have close to 300 students (!!!). I really love my students. They are so cute and so smart and I even have a soft spot for the wild, energetic ones. Basically I have a soft spot for all of them.

There have been meetings and emails and details galore. This year the fifth grade is taking an end of year test in French. It hasn't happened before in this district so the FLES PLC has been working out a lot of the finer points. There is so much involved in simply administrating this test. We need to organize a time for all 80 or so fifth graders to take the test. We need to reserve all the technology needed, a computer and microphone/headphones for each student. We have a meeting set up with our principal later this week to work out some of those details. Yet another meeting, yay!

I contribute more in planning and in the classroom which has been great. I also started taking over the first grade classes. The first lesson of the day was interesting. The behavior was rowdier than expected which made it hard to teach the lesson according to plan. By the third time I taught it that day I was feeling better about it. It's been interesting since I started taking over, and by interesting I mean not how I imagined it. My CT is really great about giving advice and being critical but constructive. But, she seems to want to jump in a lot when I'm trying to teach. I completely understand that it can be hard to all of a sudden let someone else teach you class but it's making it harder for me to be the authority for the students. I will give it a little more time since I did just start and see if by next week she has eased off more.

It's also been interesting in the world of my lesson plans. The first one I wrote was not usual. We had planned out what to do together in the office during our planning time. I then took my notes home and wrote up the lesson afterwards. That was really hard for me since in the past my lesson planning and writing has been different and I think my plan suffered. The next ones were easier to write and had more details and were in general more complete. It all takes some adjusting though.