A day in the life of an Israel Teaching Fellow

Yesterday was an absolutely incredible day at school!  I brought my Mum in to see my best (and favourite) class, my advanced grade 6's.  We had been preparing all week for her visit and they had all prepared a speech to present about themselves, a few words about a project we have been working on and a few questions to ask my Mum.

After we finished up, the kids wanted to take a photo with us but because of privacy / consent issues (I used to be a lawyer after all), I told them to draw something on the board and that we would take a photo of that:

Honestly, how cute is that acrostic poem.  It reads:

M - Mona and Sulana
O - Overwhelming
N - not give us homework
A - awesome we love you!

I promise that I didn't bribe them to write it.  I mean seriously, how perfect is the word for 'O'.  I explained what the word meant to one of the girls the other day and I think she thinks it means amazing plus a bit more which I guess is close enough.

Before getting into my wonderful grade 6 class, I had a grade 5 class.  The teacher cannot control this class.  It is a fairly large class (around 30 students) in a small room with a few expert trouble makers.  The teacher spent the whole 45 mins yelling at them to settle down.

But sitting as an outsider at the back of the class means that sometimes you get to see some really cool things.  One of the magical things I saw today was self-directed learning  A lot of the advanced kids in this class sit towards the back meaning it's easy for them to do what they want as they don't really get seen or heard.  So today, one boy started going through the index at the back of his textbook picking out words and then testing himself on the spelling.  This then moved to his desk buddy testing him on the words and vice-versa.

These kids weren't really interested in doing the text book (mostly because my fellow teaching fellow and I had done those pages of the book with them last week).  By the end of the class, about 6 kids were working on this impromptu spelling bee in pairs.  I thought it was incredible!

One kid also spent the entire class making origami and he made me a ninja as he called it (aka a ninja star). I seriously could not love these kids anymore!

MM x