Boot Camp

It has been a week and a half since my last post and there is a reason.  Institute is the equivalent of boot camp.  My schedule each day looks like this:

•      Wake up at 5 am
• Grab breakfast to go, COFFEE, and lunch from the dining hall.
•  Bus leaves at 6 am on the dot.
•  Hour long bus ride to Belzoni, MS which is when I do any last minute lesson prep. or do my devotional or start working on a new lesson plan (actually, I am currently typing this post on the bus).
•  Get to school at 7am and prepare for the babies (that’s just what we call our Kindergartners in our group) to arrive.
• The babies come in between 7:30 and 8. 
• There are four teachers for the same group of 17 kids but the other math person, Amber, and I go to a session from 8-9:30 while the two reading folks teach.
• I help manage classroom and take the kids to lunch after the session.  Then I lead teach my 45 minute math lesson (right now we’re working on colors and sorting).
• Dismissal is at 12:45.  Talk about mass chaos….I have bus duty and it is definitely not like Elm Street bus duty! J
• At 1:15 we start our first afternoon session either with all the Corps Members (CMs) at our school or just with my CMA group.  My CMA group consists of 16 Entering K teachers with our CMA (Corps Member Advisor) Leader, Brittany, who is a second year and help us out.  She’s kinda like a camp counselor and we love her to death.  She has a beautiful heart for the babies. 
• During this time, we finally get to eat lunch.
•  Sessions and occasional work time throughout the afternoon.  Sessions cover stuff like classroom management, delivering effective lessons, how to plan meaningful and engaging lessons.  So basically, junior block in a condensed amount of time.
• We get on the bus at 4:30 for an hour bus ride back that usually includes more work or just think time. 
• Arrive back at Delta State around 5:30, scarf down dinner and then head to the IRC (Instructional Resource Center in the library) to write lessons or prepare materials.
•   Some nights, I’ll meet with my Collaborative group (the three other teachers that I teach with) to plan for Academic Intervention Hour (AIH…basically small groups working on whatever the babies might be struggling with)
• My last stop is usually the Print Lab or Copy Cave to finish getting everything ready for the next day. 
• Shower and check e-mail, enter data from the day (we have assessment data to enter for each day), and submit my 2 lesson plans for the next day (one for math and one for AIH).
• On a typical night, I can finally get in bed around 11:30 or 12.

Now you know why I haven’t posted in a week and a half!  As crazy as it is though, I love it!  I might be dog tired every day but the people I am with are incredible, the kids are precious (for the most part J), and I see the value in the majority of what we do.  I wish we wouldn’t have to turn in so many lesson plans after the first week but they ask us to continue turning in two every day that are incredibly detailed and almost completely scripted.  It is basically like junior block condensed into four weeks with not as many artistic and fun projects.  A lot of the stuff we do is very similar to my education classes but I have learned a lot the last two weeks.  Now, I just have to be able to apply it to my third grade classroom in Hazlehurst! 

As for the weekends, they are pretty laid back but should definitely be used for getting ahead as much as possible.  Our school manager told us not to do any work on Saturday, so a couple of us took full advantage of that and decided to take a last minute trip to Jackson! Sarah and I both were having computer problems so we went to Best Buy and both ended up buying a MAC (thank you TFA for giving us transitional funding to get us through the summer)!! My life has been so much more productive this week and I absolutely love it.  

Just wanted to update you all on what I have been doing the past week and a half and hopefully, now that we have really gotten into a consistent schedule, I’ll be able to post again soon.  Pray for patience and love (Kindergartners require a lot of both) as well as physical strength and wellness.  Love and miss you all!

This is my Collab. group.  We have 17 energetic Kindergartners we get to see every day!  We are all showing off our official name tags we received as part of a little "graduation" ceremony they had for all of us the Friday before we started teaching.

(L to R: Harold from Pennsylvania, Cheryl from California, Amber from Boston, and me!)