Blogging and Teaching

So I'm pretty new to this whole blogging thing. I had started a blog a couple years ago in college but probably posted a total of 6 or 7 times. haha I decided to make this blog for Brayden and I because I am absolutely HORRIBLE at taking pictures. I thought that having this blog would remind me to take more pictures and write about the things we are doing in our life. Also, my mom always asks what I have been up to and I always seem to not be able to think of what we have been doing until later after I hang up the phone. So this blog will help keep the family updated on our lives as well. You are going to have to excuse the HUGE picture of us at the top. I didn't know how to make it smaller. You are also going to have to be patient if I don't post very often. Brayden always makes fun of me because I love to look at other people's blogs. He jokes that I know all of their kids names and what their family is going to do this weekend, which sometimes is true. haha So hopefully I can put some of my time looking at other people's blogs and put that towards working on my own blog. For my first post I thought I would write about my teaching experiences so far. I have learned so much from teaching this past year. Can I just say if you ever get the chance to go thank your teachers! Teachers do SO MUCH! I thought I had a pretty good idea of what a teacher did when I was doing my course work up at BYU-Idaho and was able to go to the elementary school a couple times. It wasn't until my senior year that I truly got to see all that a teacher does. During the winter semester I took my senior practicum class. This is where I went to an elementary school twice a week all day and got to teach between 1-3 times during the day. It was a great experience and I loved my cute 3rd grade class.

Aren't they so cute?? During the spring I did my student teaching. People who know me really well know that new experiences terrify me. Anything new that I start in my life (swimming lessons, piano lessons, first day of school, student teaching, etc) I get high anxiety and feel sick to my stomach. (Side Note: one of the only new things that I didn't get this feeling about was when I was marrying Brayden. I guess that's a good sign right? haha) So basically I was terrified for student teaching. I had heard horror stories about getting a horrible cooperating teacher and coming the first day and her saying "ok here's the class now teach for the entire day." Luckily, that is not how it went at all. I was blessed to get the most AMAZING cooperating teacher. She has been teaching for somewhere around 40 years. Now knowing this you might think oh she must be one of those old grumpy teachers. NOPE! She was one of the sweetest, kindest, structured, and most helpful teachers out there. Pretty much everyone at the school would go to her for help. She even got the teacher of year award from the school while I was there. So ya like I said before she's amazing. My student teaching experience was so much better than I was expecting. Now that doesn't mean everything was perfect because by all means there were definitely some VERY hard times but it wouldn't have been a true teaching experience if there wasn't hard times. So I started out in a 5th grade class for 9 weeks with that amazing teacher I mentioned above and then the last 3 weeks I was in a 4th grade classroom. I had to switch to a different class because the school I taught at was a year round school.

My cute 5th grade class! So I realized that I just wrote a TON so sorry about that. I'll try to make my posts a little more condensed in the future! :)