A Semester in the Life of a Teacher

By: Erica Ause

Teaching anywhere is never the same from one day to the next. And here it is no different. With smaller classes and an interesting environment, there are many ways to keep class lively! Next year I will be teaching mainly math and science for grades 2-8, as well as PE. The T-shirt pictured above is my Math Test Day Shirt, and I hope it will give the kids something to laugh about on otherwise stressful days!

This semester in writing the students learned how to write essays, as well as fictional stories. For their writers celebration, they read aloud the work they had done and then displayed the long and hard process they took to get from their first idea to their final draft. The whole team was invited, and everyone was really impressed by all their hard work!

Science was filled with experiments, presentations, and STEM activities. The students melted chocolate in a self-made a solar oven, discovered what material was the best type of insulation, shared presentations on Archimedes, explored how light reflects, and saw first hand magnetism caused by electricity (seen in the video above).

We had a special guest come to class to take apart my broken cell phone. He is the brother of a team member who was visiting for a couple weeks, and blew the children away with all that was hiding inside the little thing. It was sad to see my phone taken apart, but we did it for science!

They really got moving this term in PE with Zumba classes from a visiting doctor, and dance lessons from three of our teammates. They learned line dancing, and a whole hip hop choreography that they will present on the last day of school. They worked really hard, and loved every minute of it!

Gymnastics was another fan favorite of this year. They practiced balance and team work while making really cool poses and routines. They are not as easy as they look.

I'm not sure if this is because I am the PE teacher, or because my class is all boys, but breaks are usually spent getting some extra time at the gym. It's fun to teach them new ways to get stronger, and to watch them enjoy exercising.

One of the unique parts about this school is that we have something called Learning Experience Days. These are when we spend the day learning about something outside of curriculum. This semester, we explored outer space, the eye, and milk. A doctor who is here for a few months has his masters in space studies, so we felt very fortunate to learn about it from an expert! The first three pictures are from this day. We saw a student in a makeshift astronaut uniform (helmet is Tupperware), and how big the solar system is on a smaller scale, amoung other things. The picture on the top right is the day when we learned about the eye. The same doctor who studied space, is... you guessed it... an ophthalmologist. So, he also taught us about the parts and the function of the eye. The picture here is of a student dissecting one of the many goat eyes he was able to buy. Some of the kids really got into that one! The last five pictures are of our milk day. We went to the home of a hospital employee who has many animals and saw how cows are milked, fed and taken care of. It was a beautiful farm and helped us understand the difference between how we get the raw milk we drink here, and the milk we drink in the Western World.

And of course there are many ways that school spills over into my every day life. From having students help me organize the PE materials, waking up early to put fake snow out to announce the "snow day", celebrating my birthday with a cucumber and carrot snack (in the shape of a flower), and reading to the young ones who will be in school in just a few years. There are so many ways that being a teacher impacts my life outside of the classroom, and that I wouldn't any of it!