Rosmary’s class is an awesome place to be. She outlines and explains things with expertise and grace- a wonderful balance all too uncommon among teachers. She is building and preparing her grade two class with solid foundations that will promote future learning, growth and independence.
After physical education it took a while to calm everyone down and get them seated and silent. Rosmary began her math lesson with some essential concepts: the order and construction of numbers. She immediately had her students working away at understanding patterns and relations between numbers, as well as their essential components. Memorizing the sequence and structure of numbers will be crucial as these students enter into the more difficult areas of arithmetic, and yes, eventually algebra. All those 5x2s and (2x/3)-4/7s, believe it or not, start here.
Students who finished the activity moved right on to reading or catching up on work from earlier in the week. Aneudy and I had been sitting in the corner preparing templates for the upcoming art class so that, just as the children were wrapping up and tucking their math books away, Aneudy was at the front and ready to explain the next activity.
The end product will be pumpkin men, but step one had the students cutting circles carefully and forming…conics! Who ever said the mathematician and the artist were at odds? Here they meet in perfect unity, the right and left sides of the brain working wonderfully together. Logic and creativity.
During the time I spent in Rosmary’s class, kids were continually coming to me with math and art questions, or excitedly demonstrating what they had accomplished. It was heart-warming and inspiring to see these children growing and developing in so many areas; children who may have otherwise found themselves wandering the streets, disregarded and without hope.
Now, however, they are left with a high sense of value. They have teachers who lovingly invest hours and hours in their personal journeys, insisting that they have skills, potential and a bright future. Underneath it all, and most central, is the sense that they have the ultimate love of Jesus Christ, their guiding light and the lover of their souls.
This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 9th, 2007 at 3:43 pm and is filed under T.E.A.R.S. School. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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