My first week as a teacher!

Wheeewww, 1st week of classes is over and more to go! My daughter is a kindergarten pupil and to make her school year more meaningful and to make her feel the vibe of being in a classroom and to have a classmate, we invited one of her friend to join us in our daily classes. Yes, I have two pupils and he just joined us this morning.

The first week is reading a comics about the Covid Virus. There are activities there wherein the kid will identify how the character felt about the pandemic, like happy, sad, scared. They also need to draw each facial expression and to help my daughter do that, I have to act each of them. It was quite challenging because I feel like I am not a good actor, but I need to give my best shot.

But she get bored easily after reading and doing the activity so I need to keep her entertained by giving her the coloring book or matching the letters, pictures or identifying the vowels or consonants. She loves those kinds of activities, she finds it more of a game not a lesson. It was a smooth 4-days teaching for me until this morning when her classmate JM joined us.

We started our lesson with a prayer then followed by exercise and then I asked them to introduce theirselves. My daughter did it first and I asked her what would she likes to be when she grows up and she said she wants to be a wonderwoman and a chef. I also asked the same to JM and he said he wants to be spiderman and a manager. I find their answers cute and very innocent. Then I let them color two characters in their coloring book. My daughter quickly finished her piece while JM could hardly finish one because he don't know how to control his hand yet. The color looks scattered as they have different directions, but it's understandable he is only 5-years old and very playful one. I need to guide his hand to make it steady but the moment I did that, his eyes focused on something else.

Picture below is my daughter's finished output this morning, she colored the sun yellow because she said Mr. Sun is golden yellow not orange.

After coloring, I give them their 1st activity which is to draw a straight line. My daughter finished it faster than JM without any help or guidance. While JM on the other side was taking it easy and drew different shapes. Her grandmother came to watched us but when she saw that JM lost focus, she was the one who helped him finished the activity. I gave JM assignment by practicing the straight line and writing his name. That concludes our lesson for the day.

Yes, there's a big difference between my two pupils. And it's only their 1st week. I'm excited to see and discover of how we all progress with this new normal. My daughter is advanced in her studies because we make sure that even if the school year is delayed she will not stop learning. Good thing there are online templates like that of the k5learning.com which provides different activities for kids her age. Then we already started teaching her reading tagalog words and she can now read on her own. My mother is very focused in teacher her addition and subtraction and before the school year officially started my daughter already knows how to add 3-digits (with carry over) and subtract 2-digits (with borrow).

Jm on the other hand has different environment. His father is busy on his work and his mother takes care of their home and left JM playing around with his friends. His grandmother only get the chance to teach him at night which is very time limited as the boy will soon fall asleep.

I have a tough job to do and it requires a lot of patience and understanding. How to make these two kids enjoy the school year and learn at the same time. I need to prepare myself physically and emotionally as these two have different characters and attitudes. I only have two pupils and it's only their first week, I wonder how teachers managed to handle 30+ kids at the same time. I can now imagine how long their patience is! Wow, that really is commendable!

Hopefully next year, they can still experience a face to face classes so they can play with their classmates and truly feel being in school with their teacher and in the real classroom.

Thanks for reading!

Keep smiling. Keep inspiring.