1,641 Hrs.

Today was a pretty good day for me, as far as successfully pulling off several projects I have been working on.

The BBL lesson for this week is the last one we will be doing for this year. The book we are doing is called "Actual Size", and is a picture book full of "actual sized" picture of animals such as a giant stick bug, a giant earthworm, the eye of a giant squid, the atlas moth, great white shark teeth, and the mouse lemur. This weekend, I spent a whole lot of time tracing and cutting all of the figures out of cardboard, and the kids liked being able to see and hold the figures and compare them to their own features.

The third day of our St. Jude fundraiser was also a success - the total so far is $391.51. That means that we have already beat our goal of $250, and we still have three days to collect!

The kids also loved the Starfish lesson plan I created for today. Continuing in the unit of "wants and needs", we learned today that some people have to meet their needs, such as clean water and clean clothing, in different ways than other people may meet those needs. The kids are used to getting clean water from a tap and clean clothes from a washing machine, so the kids today got to try out hand-washing clothing, and filtering water. Everyone got really wet, but that made things even more fun. The kids also loved being able to wash my City Year uniform shirts. : )

It is hard for me to believe that it is practically the summer season. Since the weather never changed here in Miami, and I am used to seasons changing dramatically, I do not feel that we have already gone through fall, winter, spring, and now summer again. What a shock it will be for me to go back home to Michigan!

I am REALLY looking forward to going home, but I have just begun to realize how much I will miss the kids. This week is the last full week and the last week for intervention tutoring, next week is the last week for Jaguar Academy/Starfish Corps (next Thursday will be SFC Graduation), and the week after that is last week of school. Today we were told that we should start taking down our classroom decorations, and I wanted to cry.

I have begun to think seriously about becoming a teacher. Education is something I was never before interested in, but I have come to really love helping and teaching the children. I'm not sure, though, that I have any kind of talent at it. Maybe someday...

-Aly

DUG: 30