Day#1     

   This is my first blog although I have been at my internship already. My job is more solid now that the project has developed, besides class management I will now prepare a mini-lesson to further the education of the first and second grade periods from nine to three although I arrive early to plan and stay about half an hour to plan and confirm with my mentor Ms. Dyrness. Ms. Dyrness is  science teacher at Harder Elementary that teaches the Science period. She teaches the sixth through first grades and conducts the entire class by herself. My responsibilities include assistance with class behavior management (some periods have about 35 kids!), creating posters for the empty wall, brainstorming for lesson plans, and developing and presenting a mini lesson.

Day#7
   This is my seventh day and I am still working. The crystal growing kit project that I worked on with Ms. Dyrness seems to have failed, the crystals formed on everything BUT the base rock. So instead of doing the mineral unit we continued to work on weather which worked out anyways. The reason for this being that she wanted to postpone the mineral unit because she felt that the kids should finish the weather unit first because meteorology does not mix with geology in the first grade. So I performed an ice and condensation experiment because of the weather unit and the winter like fog. The Dimethylflouride in the can caused the water vapor in the air to freeze making snow and freezing the water in the cup to make instant ice. This went over very well with the kids. However class management is another story, some of the kids were REALLY bad like with one kid who tripped another, some kid cussed another out in Spanish, and this one chunky black kid who doesn't listen to anybody but the principal and the vice got into an argument with this white girl who never let's anyone punk her. She yelled back at him so he smashed a chair into her and bruised her arm, if not for Ms.Dyrness it would have been a fight right there, but the girl told. Even though neither I or Ms.Dyrness saw the chair smash multiple students testified in the white girls favor and the bruise that she had on her arm matched the side of the chair exactly. Also when Ms.Dyrness heard the chair collide with something she turned around and saw him holding a chair. All in all the evidence was conclusive, solved by me I told Ms.Dyrness what I had concluded so she had me take the girl to get an ice pack. The office lady asked what had happened and the girl told what had happened, quite truthfully I might add. So the office actually required Ms.Dyrness to fill out a citation and send him to the principal. Ms.Dyrness only had a detention in mind, (she is very kind) but she had to send him since he caused actual physical damage. Shortly after that I learned that Harder Elementary is a dumping school. This means that children whose schools have closed or are expelled are put into Harder.  It is a wonder Ms.Dyrness survives there. Also it must be noted the countenance of the Vice-Principal Mrs.Soledad (sol-eh-dad) is much like that of a WWI general due to all the experiences that she has had, which is very funny and she is much more strict than the Principal. I stayed after school to make decorations for the class and am still working.

Day#6

     This is a belated blog of my sixth day at my internship, that day I did, for my presentation I had prepared for the mineral unit and have grown decent sized alum crystals. However due to the slowness of contact by email, when she decided to stick to the weather unit and had to switch to talking about the planet and the sun to explain the seasons...I was without a lesson plan. Fortunately intuition happens to be a strength for me and I came up with a demonstration explaining the heat of the sun and the reason we do not burn up. Which is because of distance, but not that the energy is mitigated like on earth because of the atmosphere. It is that the energy is spread out, by using a magnifying glass and a cooking pan from the school I was able to recreate a mini replica of the sun by re-condensing it's light using the lens. Basically it was when like you burn an ant except I used paper, the only time when I burned something else outside was when a kid brought a crayon which melted and when an ant crawled into the pan. The ant exploded to the amazement of the children. Seeing something burn excited the kids greatly and keeping their attention was no challenge at all. I also added a stern warning about evaporating eyeballs and why you should not look into the sun. One kid did anyways...he had trouble seeing for a while, despite being knocked back by a fellow female classmate screaming that he could go "blind forever". Which was so funny that they received no punishment. Not all children were able to see the presentation due to behavioral issues. One class when let outside fled to the playground as Ms.Dyrness feared. Only a few from that class 8/36 children got to see it. They were chosen as good students. Perhaps next time I will come up with a more stable mini lesson. I need to fix my drop box account so I can get the pictures from my internship. Ms.Dyrness really values my help and has asked repeatedly when I am leaving, It must be hard being a teacher...the pay sucks, or so I have heard.

Day#5
  Yesterday I wanted to prepare something for weather. I was thinking of a dry ice tornado but my dad insists that the district wont allow it and neither will the school. So for the wind unit I decided to use one of my old science toys for a demonstration. It was called an Airzooka and it generates a toroid of air which impacts the target. This means that the toy is an air cannon that generates a ring vortex of air. I used this to prove that wind is actually moving air and that air exists all around us. The kids were astonished by the air ball for some reason and grew so excited one class all left their seats and swarmed me like a beehive. Ms.Dyrness and I had to get them to sit down but it was hard. At least the kids were excited about science though. Most classes were good except for this one Mexican boy who decided to slap my butt and steal the box of pins. The problem was he was too young to really be held responsible. It seems though he got what was coming to him when at least six of the kids tried to get the box of pins back and tried to tackle him. However, they could not tackle the biggest and fattest kid in the entire first grade of Harder elementary to be blunt about it. However they did significant damage to his shirt though. It was difficult but Ms.Dyrness split up the kids and retrieved the box of pins. I did not tell her what happened though. the second class we had behaved wonderfully. I told their teacher that they are the best class but it turned out it was only a sub. She was very African and still had the accent, she dressed nicely. The next unit is on geology so I am preparing crystals for a demonstration and have a kit that I plan to give to Ms.Dyrness.

Day#4
This week Ms.Dyrness was finishing up on physical science and decided to review sound. As for my class management role I am beginning to see who are the good, the funny, and the troubled kids. It is no challenge to see who the problem children are but the first period is the worst. Just because they speak Spanish they talk the worst crap and think that they can get away with it. However my dad is from Bolivia and my step-mother is from Honduras and most of my family speaks Spanish all the time. So end up hearing almost all the nasty things they say (my Spanish is not the best) and they are only in first grade! Oh the things that I hear them say. Not all of the students are this way though in fact the bad are only a few....thank god! I also have come to the realization that I will NEVER be a teacher. I  understand that I can tolerate only so much of little kids. I will not at all costs, get an internship at a school. I love my mentor Ms.Dyrness (the kind mentor that she is) with all my heart, but I cannot stand some of those first graders. When I do my keynote and they ask me what I learned. My #1 on the list will be PATIENCE, and Nobody will ever get to call me impatient after THIS. Aside from that growing irritation most of the children are quite nice and this one girl has become attached to me. it is kind of cute actually. For my demonstration I used a massage machine and a bowl of colored water to show that sound is vibration. By exposing it to rapid vibration the water reacted but instead of splashing, it formed wave patters as expected. I used this to show the first graders that sound can travel through air in the same way. Also I used a cornstarch and water mix as well.....it slimed and crawled out of the container. I tried to color it and make it black for Halloween but it came out gray. It was interesting to see it ooze though, even I surprised myself. It was a great success!

Day#3
Today the unit was on physical science and it is my first time presenting for the kids. I helped Ms.Dyrness unpack a lot of materials for the unit this time. There is a whole storage full of materials, only half of it can be used because the rest is either dated or it cannot be used in the unit. Also not all of the teachers materials in the organized kits in the shed are intact and no instructions are to be found so we had to figure everything out ourselves. We found a lot of materials for the magnet unit, most of which was junk. It was a surprise when we found military grade neodium earth magnets. They were very strong and there was a very stern pinch and flak warning on the back. I think it meant debris from the colliding magnets. As it turns out one did shatter it split in half and a shard shred the wall paper. i was much more careful after that and we decided that these were magnets that the kids were definitely not going to use lest they combine the force of all eight magnets by putting them together. The presentation I did used magnets to manipulate metal objects and magnets to display magnetic force. i levitated, pulled, spun and magnetized the metal objects which actually turned out to be a better demonstration than I expected. Ms.Dyrness had the students do a lab in which they created a compass but it turned out to be very messy so now Ms.Dyrness is reluctant to do any more labs. She will just have them write. I think ms.Dyrness will now do labs once a month or something like that.

Day#2
Today I did not present. I just helped to manage the class with behavior and became acquainted with the students. There seem to be a wide variety both in race and behavior. Some students are easy to work with like the small Asian girl with pigtails who never gets in trouble, others are extremely annoying like this hyper kid who runs around the classroom yelling, but others are just plain bad, people may say bad children do not exist but when a kid bullies the others, cusses the teacher out, and  runs around trying to beat people up.....you know for a fact that the kid is bad. What Ms.Dyrness had me do though mainly was to clean a rather large set of class microscopes which in a short while had accumulated a rather large amount of dust. I also had to clean the microscope slides which were just as many. The slides however were more interesting than the microscopes because they were from Japan. The slides were weird for the most part because there was a slide collection comprised exclusively of blood. The slides had pig, frog, ox, monkey, and fish blood with many others as well. There was a "rust" on one of the microscopes that really resembled dried blood..........I left the topic alone. I just cleaned it off. There were other themed boxes of slides included, there were a lot of botanical Anyways being a teacher seems harder than I thought.

Day#8
Today the unit was on weather and I was finally able to obtain the dry ice for the weather unit. Ms.Dyrness finally explained to my dad that under certain conditions it would be allowed by the school district H.U.S.D. . So I woke up early and he bought me a bought a five pound block of dry ice (which was surprisingly inexpensive) and bagged it, before putting it in a Styrofoam cooler that my dad found that was fortunately made for the exact purpose of carrying dry ice. The subject for the weather unit was clouds and it was my most successful demonstration so far. I put the dry ice in water to create the mist of which a cloud is made of and therefore was able to pour some into their hands and have them touch a cloud for the first time, besides fog that is. I also was able to take the demonstration even further by reviewing the storm section of the curriculum and use the mist, to create a crude reproduction of what happens inside a tornado to furhter explain it's behavior and components. This was about as successful as the first demonstation and went well.

Day# 10

Today is my final day at the school Harder...thank god. No offence though. It really is hard being a teacher especially with small children, I prefer the upper grades. The attitude at least comes with reason and a sound slightly lwess hyper persona. Today they were reviewing the hard to plan for subject, planets. I decided to do a discourse on rocketry and have them build mini rockets which went well so far. The rockets use baking soda and vinigar as fuel since no fire is allowed on campus and the body is composed of a film canister wrapped in a paper shell. The cone and the fins are paper as well. As for my last day I am going out with a bang....I really hope Ms.Dyrness will be okay without me. I was only her training wheels so I will see if she can do well while Im gone or go to a non-ghetto school to be frank about it.

Day # 9

This is my last day with the first graders and instead of doing the mineral unit we did a paper project because the wretched crystals still havent grown properly. We tried snowflakes as to promote the seasons unit but it turned out to be too difficult for the children so we switched to paper airplanes and it turned out well. The project was time costly though and needed to have us cut some things short so they could finish. I am really glad my last day is noty with the first graders because nw I cannot help but slighly despise small children, even thought they made me cards I am traumatized and  my opinion is skewed. Not all little children are difficult but neverheless I will stay away from little kids for a good long while. Especially from schools.