Weeks 3 & 4

The past few weeks have certainly been interesting with the sugar rushes on Valentine's Day and excitement after field trips. Recently, I have noticed more behavioral issues. We had one girl decide to cut her hair in the middle of the first grade writing class. After this, another student refused to leave the corner of the room, shaking in fear, because "if she could cut her own hair, that means she could cut mine too!" The other two teachers I work with have had to deal with language from another first grader, and struggled with a writing student who writes every day yet claims she can't read.

In my older class, the students can be unruly, but they at least recognize when they push their teacher too far. One of them wrote me a poem about his feelings, and the sixth graders became very interested in high school events I've been to--e.g., prom. One of the most striking things I've noticed in the older class is their growing conception of what is "cool" and what is not--this is extremely different from the sixth graders at BASIS Peoria. At Sunset Heights, the students cannot try too hard academically without being a nerd, there is a certain style in between fancy and lazy (joggers are extremely popular) that all of the "cool" kids seem to have.

In general, the older students seem to want to learn more and try harder to catch up with their peers while the first graders don't seem to care or fully grasp how much they are falling behind in their writing. Even so, almost all of the first grade students have made noticeably improvements in the few weeks I've been working with them, and if they can overcome their frequent behavioral issues, I think that by the end of the school year they will be able to write fluently, with limited vocabulary and sentence structure, on their own.