we took some pretty cute pictures down in the cities this christmas! ryann had a blast opening all of her gifts. she LOVED this random ribbon she found at debbie's and danced around for almost an hour. it was hilarious. i wish we had a video camara, but no such luck. lately ryann has been asking what letters are what. she walks around with her little magnetic letters and says "whats that?" and then repeats the name of the letter. its crazy how fast they can learn when they are so small!!
i am starting to get ready to go back to naytahwaush. hopefully things will be better now that the excitement of christmas break is over. i'm looking for all sorts of activities i can plan to do with the kids because they have such short attention spans. as long as i have more than enough games and projects planned for the day, we should be able to switch from one thing to another as needed all day long. im just worried about the discipline problems! its hard to come up with a plan when the whole school is not doing the same thing. the kids get used to one teacher and then move to the next grade and have to learn all over again. not to mention that the teachers change so frequently from year to year. no wonder they have such a hard time listening to the teachers!!

Naytahwaush Charter School

WOW!! What a shock to start my new job. I was just hired as a long term sub for kindergarten at Naytahwaush Charter School on the White Earth Reservation. My first day was not fun at all since I had 12 little 5 and 6 year olds running wild in the room. I found out the hard way that the school does not have a discipline policy and the classroom teacher has to deal with all issues herself. Well thats not so easy when you have a class full of kids kicking, hitting, punching, swearing, and running away from school. So day one ended with me driving home in tears. Luckily, day 2 was much better. I got to carpool with the 2nd and 3rd grade teachers (they are married) and the special ed teacher who all clued me in on how to make it through a day teaching. The day went much better (still had some kids run away, and one get kicked in the face), but all in all things went better. I tried to find everything the kids were doing right and praise them like crazy for doing it! They definitely respond to positive reinforcement. So now we are on christmas break until Jan 2 and I will be back in the classroom until the end of Feb. I hope things go better when I get back because I would love to stay at that school and teach full time next year. I just have to figure out the best way to run the classroom!

So today Ryann learned the word Penguin. She has started repeating almost everything we say, including "Shoot" and "Crap". So Brett and I have to watch what we say around her. She also has some weird fascination with butts. She always points to her butt, or anyone elses butt and says "butt". Its kinda weird. She's also obsessed with Diego and Dora and walks around all day saying "dago? door?" (which means diego, dora in ryann language) We got her tons of dora and diego things for christmas, so i hope she likes them for awhile!

MERRY CHRISTMAS!!

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