April, 2014 our Academic Head gave me this sheet of paper. It's a printout memo showing the list of our advisory classes on that year. For others, it's just a piece of paper. But for me it's really important because it always reminds me that I handled a very precious batch of students.
Class Advisory Assignment
Actually, before I applied in our school, all of my co-teachers had given already their advisory classes to them, except for the grade 5 class. So they decided to recruit a new teacher to handle the grade 5. When I got the job, they asked me to handle the grade 5 class to be my advisory.
Some of the teachers warned me because the class I'm going to handle is a very noisy class, but since I told myself after my graduation in college to be an understanding teacher, I wasn't affected and put it my mind it's a challenge I need to face. So challenge accepted!
It was really overwhelming on my part because I was a newbie teacher that time. I was overthinking a lot of things because I graduated as a Secondary Education student, I was totally worried because I had no idea how to take good care of young kids. Because of my eagerness to my profession, I did study as a preparation for my new job as a grade school teacher. I read books about Grade School Teaching Techniques, Child Psychology, Guidance and Counseling, Behavioral Science, and many more, just to gain idea about grade school teaching.
It was May, 2014 and in less than a month, I was expecting to meet my grade 5 students. We, teachers during that time were all busy decorating their classrooms. At first, it was like torturing me because I wasn't good at decorating stuff. I wasn't artistic that time, so I couldn't imagine what decors or motif I would put to in my classroom. So I asked my co-teachers to suggest any ideas. Teacher Jannah and Teacher Anna suggested nature to be my motif because it's more appealing to children according to them.
Banner
Nature motif
Our greenboard
Me ^_^
Science Posters
So I followed their advice. I used nature as my motif for my classroom. Since I'm an avid fan of SCIENCE!, Of course I wanted my classroom to be surrounded by Science stuff. So I put some Science-related posters all around the classroom.
Weeks have passed until that day. It was June 9, 2014. The start of school year 2014-2015. I met these 9 out of 10 young grade 5 students:
Our First Class Picture
Our First Class Picture
First row from left to right: Sebastian Navarro N. Gonzales, Jared Yosef B. Sangalang, William Andrew S. Chiang, Baek Min Woo, Siegfrid Malcolm C. Geronimo, and Roshan Grace R. Calleja
Back row from left to right: Lorenzo Raphael G. Villa, John Mark J. Castro, and John Gabriel Calzado
Unluckily, Dorothea Noreen M. Sagrado was absent that day.
Our First Wacky Picture
Our First Wacky Picture
Their First Classroom Activity
Their First Classroom Activity
We did our very first class activity. I asked them to make our classroom's bulletin board.
So using the art materials I provided, they worked together as one team.
I was observing them and my first impression was immediately created to my mind. They were all cooperative.
I was expecting them to be noisy of course just what their other teachers have warned me, but it was okay for me. As long as they're learning and creating, being noisy is not a big sin for me.
