Rachel's Blog Day 1!!!!

Today was such an awesome day filled with firsts that I will always remember. I worked with a teacher at the Dora Reed Children's Center and helped out with the 4/5 year olds in her classroom. The morning started out in the classroom by serving breakfast to the kids and after that it was basically a "free day". There were different centers set up around the room that included building blocks, a sand station, a pretend kitchen with dishes, dress-up, etc. Side note- I'm going to use symbols like !@#$%&*() in order to describe students! After breakfast was over I played kitchen with ! and @ which was a lot of fun because we pretended things were really hot and couldn't touch with our bare hands. I also played dress-up with !@ and # where we dressed up as an artist, firefighter, construction worker, and policeman. I played at the sand station with ! and $ which was really cool because it was red clay sand versus our typical sandbox sand. The classroom also had a gigantic tub of plastic animal figurines that all the kids including !@#%*) played with and were preparing for "battle". While all of this was happening our teacher was doing an activity with the kids where they were hand printing and foot printing paper that they later cut out and put on kites for each individual student. The kids were pretty preoccupied with tying strings around their foreheads and calling themselves the ninja turtles. When it got closer to lunch time our teacher had all the kids sit down and go over the months, days of the week, colors, and shapes they had been previously talked about. After this we all had lunch together and then it was nap time where I was envious of the kids because I was so tired by that point. I read Curley for most of that time and throughout nap time some of the kids got up to go out to the bus or that was just when their parents were picking them up. By the time nap time was over, the kids that were left had a snack and then we headed to wrap around where I mostly just pushed kids on the swings until it was time to go. It was definitely a unique first day because I've never had so many curious faces asking me so many questions at once. I'm excited to see what this week brings especially if it was as cool as today!