Student Teacher

My student teacher met with me after school today. I happened to be walking past the door right when she entered the building, so our first meeting was a bit awkward.  First, I took her to the classroom and let her take her coat off. Then I gave her a tour of the school.  She said she's never observed/taught classes in a christian school before (only once in an inner city school), so she's looking forward to being here.  After meeting all the teachers, we settled in to discuss class schedules and curriculum and which lessons she wants to teach.

I think we've come up with a good plan! She loves history, so she'll be teaching most of the MN history lessons in April.  She gets good topics like the Great Depression, WWII, and the Cold War.  She'll also be teaching the 7/8th graders about the body systems.  Sigh, I'm kind of sad about that... I LOVE teaching about the body systems.  Oh sure I'll get to teach a few of them: the Excretory/Urinary System, Immune/Lymphatic System, Integumentary System, and... the Reproductive System, dun dun dun!  I guess the Digestive System is the one I'm most bummed about not teaching.  Maybe I can teach extra stuff about it during the Excretory System lesson.  I just have to remind myself, "You're here to help her prepare to be a teacher. How's she supposed to get better if she doesn't teach anything?!"

The past two days my kiddos have been fascinated with the microscopes. I've had them sitting on the lab table for about a week or two and yesterday finally had some slides set up for the 7/8th graders to check out.  One of the 8th grade boys wanted to keep looking at things, so I gave him a quick tutorial on dos and don'ts of microscope use and let him have free range.  There are actually quite a few prepared slides for them to look at... lots of plant parts.  When the 5/6th graders saw what the big kids got to do, they wanted a turn.  So I taught them too!  Most of the 5th graders spent read-aloud time looking through the scopes!  They'll have even more fun next week when my favorite biology professor at BLC comes to do a spider lab with us.  If it's a nice day, we'll hunt for spiders in the woods for an hour or so.  If it rains, he'll show a ton of spider pictures and bring spectroscopes so they can look at live spiders magnified (Shoot, now I can't remember if that's the correct name for the microscope I'm thinking of... it's the kind that lets you look at living things 3D magnified. I remember it starts with an "s"!).