My New (Little) Friends

I've been working with The Whole Child Learning Company since the beginning of March. More specifically, I work with the Little Amigos branch of the company. So I'm a prekindergarten Spanish teacher. Working with little ones has never been on my agenda; however, I am enjoying this new chapter of my life immensely. The kids that I work with are not only adorable, they listen and participate in class! (Well, at least they do most of the time.)

See, they're cute!

I don't work at a school. Well, I do…but I work at various locations. I'm a visiting teacher, so I give classes with a number of kids at Trinity Christian Academy, New Visions Academy, Alamo Heights Presbyterian Day School, and Country Kids Academy. They're all private schools in the northeast side of San Antonio. Traveling from place to place helps against having a monotonous life. As much as I'm ready to sail towards the rest of my life, I do think that this is a great transition. Plus, this job is giving me the opportunity to explore things that are completely out of my comfort zone. And by things I really mean children. Sure, I've been around them before and babysat and all, but teaching them is a completely different story. Granted, I only have them for 40 minutes at a time, and my biggest group of children has probably been of 8 or 9 kids.

Beyond everything already mentioned, I love my job because kids say the darndest things! One of the conversations between two girls went as follows:
          Student 1: I know what I want to be when I grow up!
          Student 2: What do you want to be?
          Student 1: I want to be a cheerleader! And I also know what you want to be.
          Student 2: I know you do! But, tell me, what do I want to be?
          Student 1: You want to be a weather girl.
          Student 2: No!
          Student 1: Then what do you want to be?
          Student 2: I want to be a MERMAID!
          Student 1: Oh, okay. You would be a good mermaid.
They have also had conversations about my hair. One little boy insists that it's ugly while another students claims that my hair is as beautiful as Belle's (from Beauty & the Beast -- such a compliment!). So I guess my hair is a controversial topic of debate in my pre-k classes, haha.

In all, I think one of my favorite things about getting to work with this age is that we do a good amount of arts & crafts. We read, we sing, but mostly, we color and cut and paste pretty paper! One of my favorite projects so far has been making rainbow fish with them. I cut up tissue paper and they made their very own pez with all of the colors of el arcoiris! I'm pretty sure it was one of their favorite projects, too. At first they were so sad that they didn't get to color that week, but  then they were so excited to show their  mamá y papá! And to tell you the truth, I was nervous about having them work with glue sticks. But they were such champs!