November 4, 2014

Voting went well this morning. It was the first time voting at the new place because of the move. My mom ended up getting a dude that took forever to find her name because he was more worried about his scones not being delivered. Then while I was voting and trying to read about an amendment to something he started struggling with his phone and eventually began a loud phone conversation with a girl at the coffee shop about the missing scones. So other than that dude, voting went well.

This morning I didn't have literacy centers in kindergarten because a Russian guy came to talk about Russia (the music and other cultural things, not politics). They broke the school into two groups to view the presentation in the library. It was really good. He played several different instruments, taught one kid how to play the “squeeze box” so he could play along with his accordion, showed a video of traditional Russian dancing and taught some dance moves to several of the kids. I was almost tempted to stay for the second performance, and I probably should have, but I enjoyed the one I saw.

The rest of my morning was spent downloading PDFs and researching some stuff about Pages for one of the student interns, who seems to be engaged in an eternal struggle with his new Mac computer.

This afternoon I had both kindergarten classes and one of the third grade classes. The kindergarteners were thankfully uneventful and in third grade I helped several kids with reducing fractions. It is actually kind of tricky trying to describe how to do that. It was all basic stuff that can be easily done in your head or know immediately, like that 3/6 or 5/10 is obviously equal to ½. But these kids haven't actually gotten to that point in class yet so most of them had no idea what was going on. I got to the point with a few of them where they were actually able to solve a least one or two of the problems without me walking them through it.

Tonight I took a break from school work. I feel like I have been working non-stop on annotated articles or making my infographic, and now that both of those projects are turned in, I needed a day off. Tomorrow I'll jump back into the weekly discussion reading. I also really need to dig into the reflective journal because that due date is coming up real quick and I've got a lot of writing to do.