Wednesday- Chicago- TFA

Our group decided to sleep in 15 minutes this morning since we has been arriving a little too early to school but it didn’t matter because I had been unable to sleep all night. Even the lulling snore of my fellow group members didn’t bring sleep. When we left this morning we had made it halfway to Starbucks when I realized I had forgotten my camera. I gave money to Lauren to get me hot chocolate and some amazing pumpkin bread while I ran back to the church. Luckily it wasn’t far and we both finished at the same time. With the group together again Lauren, Paige, and I headed for the metro with coffee and hot chocolate in hand. The warm drinks made the cold dreary morning much warmer feeling. Today on the bus we take from the metro to Ariel I noticed some of the students on the bus who attend school there. I also saw high school students who got off much earlier and a few middle school students among the odd assortment of daily bus riders.

I was originally supposed to help in Mr. Jake’s 7^th grade classroom but he had a substitute today so I went to Mrs. Delgato’s Kindergarten class to assist in the morning. We read stories and acted it out. The story was about a snake catching mice but the mice were sneaky and got away. The kids had a blast escaping from the snake. After the game it was time for math. Using the mice that the snake tried to eat we found numbers that added up to ten. It took quite a while for them to grasp the concept that ten could be achieved by the sum of different numbers. Once they understood though they were quite capable of the assignment. The students here are really pushed hard. In kindergarten they are reading complete sentences and I was astonished. Sadly though the high achievement fades off as the grades progress. As I saw yesterday the students writing deteriorated quickly as incentive faded. It is hard for children this age to see the long term benefits of learning and understanding the material they are presented with here.

In the afternoon I was in Mrs. Suffredin’s room of third graders. I watched their African American presentations which were nice after doing more recycling. The style of this classroom was a little too harsh for my personal taste but it was good to see another teaching style. I worked with two students the remainder of the afternoon on reading fluency and sounding out words. The end of school came very quickly and we headed for our bus and metro like usual.

I got off early at the Monroe station to take a transfer bus to the Union Station to meet a friend of mine from KU. We had planned on spending the afternoon sight seeing but due to the increasingly cold and eventually snowy weather we decided to just check out some stores on Michigan Ave. While walking down the street we ran into three more KU students, fraternity brothers of my friends. They were headed for Chicago style pizza and we tagged along and another two people joined us. It was a blast hanging out with my friends from Lawrence and made me feel much less alone in this big city. As we finished dinner the others went to a show and my friend and I stopped to buy some Ghirardelli chocolates. The night was still young so we went to the theater to see The Investment Bureau. It was a great movie but we had trains to catch so he put me back on a Red line and we said goodbye. When I returned to the church my group had rented a movie and everyone headed up to the room with comfy couches to watch it. It wasn’t long before sleep was calling our names and we had to crash for the evening.

-Kaitlynn Nelson