Friday, December 3, 2010

A teacher's best friend

This copier/printer is amazing! Not only can you make single-page copies and print pages with lightning speed, but it will make two-sided, stapled handouts out of one-sided single pages! It was awesome to be able to take four, one-sided pages and turn them into a two-page, two-sided, self-stapled handout for a class of 15!

Knitting class met for the first time today. I was super excited because it's my first elective and it's teaching something I enjoy doing. I wasn't expecting 15 kids to sign up, but that's more hats for preemies by the end of the trimester. I even had four boys sign up for the class, not just girls. Their other choice for the time slot was journalism, and our suspicion is that they signed up for knitting so they wouldn't have to write anything. Either way, they're making hats, whether they like it or not ;) What surprised me was that two of the boys actually followed me around the classroom as I attempted to make my way around to the different groups so I could help them get started. The boys were determined to get the hang of casting on before class was over and it made me happy that they actually wanted to learn and do it for themselves. They were particularly chatty to start off, it being last period on Friday, but once we got down to business, everybody was putting effort into what they were doing. I wish I had pictures, but I was so busy trying to get to everyone that I didn't even have a chance to take a single shot. Thankfully, a couple of the girls caught on quickly and were able to help their neighbors. I had also left a laptop hooked up to a projector and a group that I hadn't been able to see replayed a video on Youtube to check out how to cast on. I'm going to have to adjust my original outline for the class, probably take out a practice project, in order to make sure that we have enough time to get basic skills down before we start on the hats. I want the kids to be able to be proud of the hats they send to St. Agnes and not be thinking, "This hat sucks."

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