visit 8

Visit Number 8

Today was my eighth visit to the Sunnyvale Trailer Park. Today is very humid and the air is sticky, I hope it doesn’t make the children less attentive. As I pulled into the school parking lot I was relieved to see that the spray paint from the side of the building had not been replaced by the neighborhood hoodlums. Things like that can have very negative effects on the school children, especially at such a young age. I headed inside and said my usual good mornings to Mr. Lahey and Randy. I then went and talked to Mrs. Peterson for a few minutes and she told me that she had gone ahead and put more new materials in my folder because my group and I were moving at such a gradual pace. As I walked down the hall to my classroom I noticed a teacher escorting two young boys to the principal’s office. The boys were both red in the face and appeared out of breath. One boy’s shirt was ripped at the collar and other boy had what looked like fist marks on his cheek. It was pretty obvious that these kids had been fighting and teacher had broken it up. Both boys were Hispanic and it really bothered me that they fought at such a young age and that they even went as far as to throw punches. I helped the teacher escort the kids to the office and then headed down the hall to my trailer. On the way I noticed a teacher in the hallway yelling at a student who had apparently been using very vulgar language. I wasn’t sure if screaming at the child in the hall was the correct way to go about dealing with him, but then again I don’t know what the child said, if he had been warned or if he had greatly offended somebody in his class. I heard him tell his teacher that he thought it was okay because that was how his family and he spoke at home. I could see the astonished look on the teachers face but I wasn’t able to see how she dealt with the situation. Hopefully she called his parents and explained his home behavior was having negative affects during school and that they needed to watch their language around him. But anyway I finally got to my trailer and entered. I was greeted with the usually many hellos and kids begging to come work with me. I talked to Barb for a few minutes about what we would do and she told me she was very proud of everything I had done with the children so far. I took my spot at the table in the back and called up Ricky, Julian, Lucy, and the new student J-rock. We quickly reviewed what he had gone over the previous work before and then got to work on rhyming schemes. We went over the parts of the word that rhyme with other words and then reviewed many rhyming words. We played a very fun memory card game where the deck contained about twenty cards of ten rhyming pairs. The kids seemed to really like this game and they were very enthusiastic. They were all very sad to have to return to class as the second group came running up with smiles from ear to ear. We quickly got into the rhyming activity and the children were all working so hard and doing an excellent job. The more positive comments I gave the kids the harder they worked and the harder they worked led to greater results at the end of the day. Today was another successful day and I am not looking forward to next because it will be my final visit to the Sunnyvale Trailer Park. L