Day Two: Kindergarten and Sunshine

Today we had kindergarteners!  It was really fun.  I team taught with Ryan.  We had twelve students and four mothers in our group.  The children were so full of energy.  They were really excited about everything.  The best part was the absolutely beautiful weather!  It was sunny and warm which put everyone in a good mood.  I know I was definitely in a much better frame of mind to teach because of the weather.

The students found some really neat things on their own today.  They found a butterfly wing, a snake, an eagle and a shell, just to name a few.  The vernal pool went amazing with them.  They absolutely loved it.  There were so many critters in the water today!  The variety that the students found was awesome.  It was so much more than other groups I've been with have found.  They found salamander and frog tadpoles, aquatic worms, predacious diving beetles, mosquito larva, crayfish, and the little red things, I think they're mites?  I wasn't expecting the students to want to know what everything was, but they did.  They couldn't even wait for us to look at everything at the end.  Every time they found something they wanted me to tell them what it was.  Then when they found it again they would bring it to me and tell me what they found.  Some students would even look into other student's dippers and make comments about what they thought or knew it was.  I really enjoyed how they took control of their learning, remembered what they learned, and made connections.

The group I had today had a lot more energy than the pre-schoolers I had yesterday, which was a little surprising to me.  I definitely had a more difficult time trying to keep all of the students together to explain things.  Sometimes I would only have part of the group to show something to because other students had already gone up ahead, or were lagging behind.  We had three boys who consistently wanted to be running ahead, so we played the running version of 1, 2, 3, Hush a lot.  We had a lot of students continuously mention that they were hungry or needed to use the restroom, which resulted in almost every student deciding they needed to use the restroom.  We managed to get them all to hold it for over 30 minutes, but we ended up picking up the pace to get them all back to the restroom and finishing the loop early.  Once everyone went to the restroom we went part way down a trail and came back to kill the 20 minutes of time that we had left.  While these were minor setbacks I think that the students learned a lot and it didn't draw away from the learning too much.  

After we got back today, Emily and I went Kayaking.  It was my first time Kayaking here and it was amazing.  It was so peaceful and quiet.  We saw six Canada geese and a bunch of little yellow goslings waddling along the edge of the water.  We also saw a crane fly out of the cattails.  It was so much fun and a nice break from everything.  It was relaxing, but also a great arm workout that worked as my cross training for track practice today.  It was also really nice to spend time with Emily.