Tutoring Fun Day

I am so glad I have been working on my Professional Development for this class! For class we are required to have six hours of Professional Development (PD). Firstly, I have never heard of any opportunities to earn PD and felt sick to my stomach knowing I may not get all six hours. Luckily, I did manage to find opportunities. My resource was found by joining the TSTA association on campus. Each week for their meeting they offered an hour of professional development. Plus, their professional development was actually beneficial to me. I also found out about a program called Junior Achievement through a TSTA professional development. And Dr. Garcia said I can use my volunteer teaching times with Junior Achievement as part of my professional development hours. What a relief! I really like how Dr. Garcia required us to gain six hours of PD because it is something I will be doing all the time as a teacher. And it was a nice way to introduce myself to PD and figure out how to find ways to satisfy that requirement. I look forward to more PD opportunities. I feel that the more I attend and the more exposure to it the more knowledgeable of a teacher I will become and hopefully it will help me refine my teaching skills too. And the last perk of all of this is I was able to turn in my PD today, a week before it was due. I am very happy to have that completed and now I can focus even more on tutoring.

The previous week Jarod’s mom had told my partner and me that Jarod had STAAR testing this week. My partner and I decided to plan a fun session for him today. What I also liked about our activity today is that my tutoring partner was finally able to do her military role-play that she had been eager to do since the second week of tutoring. She planned out all the obstacle courses for Jarod since she was in the military and has extensive knowledge because her family and spouse is in the military too. I am glad she planned the obstacle courses because I have no exposure to that side of life and no clue what obstacles military personnel need to do for training. Jarod seemed to appreciate a less writing focused tutoring session and had fun just running around being a kid. I was excited for the end of the session because I did another science experiment with Jarod. I taught Jarod how to make ice cream using milk, sugar, vanilla, ice, and rock salt. One of Jarod’s favorite school subjects is science so I like to try and incorporate it in whenever I can because he becomes really engaged. And with the ice cream making experiment he was engaged and definitely loved the reward of eating ice cream at the end. I am really sad we only have a few more tutoring sessions left. This has been such a great experience for me. I now feel confident in writing lesson plans, tailoring lessons to a student’s needs, and working with a student. Plus I have been learning I am good at coming up with ideas. A lot of the ideas I have done with Jarod that were my own, he seemed to really enjoy and learn from. I know I meant to be a teacher and these past few weeks have continued to prove that to me.