First Practicum Review

Welcome back! 

(I’m talking to myself here) 

Ok, so I took a bit of a blog hiatus while I was on my first practicum. There are three major reasons for this: 

1) Practicum was intense guys. I worked my tush off for the past 3 weeks and was exhausted all the time. 

2) Contrary to the implication made by this post’s time stamp, I like to blog in the morning. I’m far more productive in pretty much every aspect of life in the morning. During practicum I arrived at my school at 8:30 each morning, so there was no blogging to be done in the AM. 

3) My number one blog supporter (my brother) was without internet until last week, so I felt that my awesome posts could wait until my promoter was back behind his desk. 

Hi Mat

Mat, say hello to everyone. 

I was assigned my first practicum this week. I got a grade 6 class in a small suburban town about 10km outside of The City. Very upper-middle class, very Anglo. I think it’s going to be a nice place to learn the basics of how to teach, before being introduced to all the different aspects of super diverse classrooms (I’m sure that will come with my future practicums. At least I hope so; I do want to experience teaching in a culturally and socioeconomically diverse classroom.). 

My associate teacher seems like a very nice woman, though very precise with high expectations, which is perfect. Though my practicum doesn’t start until Monday, I went in for a half-day today to check out the classroom and meet the kids and teacher. The kids were pretty underwhelmed about my presence, but they’re in grade 6, how excited are they going to get. 

I don’t know how I’m going to like grade 6. It definitely is not my first choice of grades; those kids are way too old for my liking. But when I was doing my placements for ECE I said the same thing going in to my school-age placement (I thought for sure I was meant to be a toddler teacher), and I ended up loving school-age. We’ll see. 

Anyways, about my mat. Mat, where are you? 

There he is. 

Baked Potato and Bacon Soup

The weather is just barely beginning to get crispy, and already I’m breaking out my hearty soups. I love soup at any time of the year, but there’s nothing quite like getting cozy on the couch with a warm bowl of soup on a crisp fall day. 

That’s why this week I made baked potato and bacon soup 

I know, I know, that looks gross. Hey, my job is not to make food pretty, it’s to make food yummy. And that food you see up there… well it was YUMMY!! 

Upcycling Tin Cups to Office Supply Holders

I have a confession. Sometimes I buy certain brands of food because I like the packaging they come in. This is the case with these peach slices:

There’s something nostalgic about those little metal tins that just cannot be matched by plastic cups. But then, after throwing who knows how many in the recycling bin, I had a small epiphany: I can do something crafty-like with those. 

After some debate amongst the different ideas that came into my head, I landed on making a handful of them into office supply holders.