Dreaming of Wishing Wells

I'm home for the weekend. Hence the title. I think I am indeed regaining my sanity, probably only to lose most of it again this week. This week was very up and down. Tuesday and Thursday were pretty good days. Thursday at the end of the day the kids said to me, "Miss Seefeldt, you're smiling!" That was nice. But it's a shame that I must be smiling so rarely that they feel the need to point it out when I am. Because it's basically a fact that I typically smile all the time. I had some volunteers in my class this week, which was in a lot of ways nice. Sometimes I think it added to the chaos though. Wednesday morning Miss Lisa volunteered in my class. She is a mom who homeschools her kids and comes to UrbanPromise twice a month to do a craft with kindergarten. She is so sweet, and I felt horrible (as well as really embarrassed) that the kids were so out of control and that some of them were really disrespectful to her. I started to cry a little on the playground...

Another week over. Another weekend to regain my sanity and be refreshed. This week was really hard. In some ways the class is getting better I guess. But there were also moments of pure chaos this week. And I felt really helpless. For whatever reason, nothing I've tried has worked to make Sincere listen to me. I can tell he has no respect for me, and he basically laughs when I tell him what to do and then throws whatever he can find and climbs to the top of the cubbies. It's quite disruptive to my teaching as you can imagine. And everyone keeps telling me to "be really firm," which I'm sure is good advice, but no one is able to tell me what that practically looks like. I'm sure I have to find out for myself what that will look like for me. It's been really encouraging to talk to Kaitlin who in a lot of ways had a tough first year of teaching last year and hear that she made it through a lot of the same things I'm facing now. Overall, even though God is...

Here are a few pictures of my classroom! First the before.... Yikes! Disaster area! I didn't even know where to begin. I think I spent a few hours just staring at it all. And then after... Aren't the kids cute in their little uniforms? Anyway, there's definitely more order to the space now. It is a little crowded, but I rearranged some furniture yesterday and we'll see how that goes. Tomorrow night is Back-to-School Night. I'm kind of nervous to talk to all the parents, but they've all been pretty nice to me so far, so I hope they don't ask too many hard questions. It's been a nice Sunday. I went to another loooooong church service today. I don't know where I'll end up going. I haven't loved any of the 4 churches I've been to so far. But I have enjoyed going to church again after not really going over the summer or much my senior year because of working in the nursery and children's church. But now it's bedtime already. Ugh...I do...

8 days of school down. Many more to go. Lots more chances to get this teaching thing and this loving children thing figured out. Because I definitely don't have it yet. But I digress... I'm settled in here in Wilmington for the most part. I'm enjoying living in the staff house, although it's pretty crowded and sometimes hard to get in the bathroom. But those are minor inconviences considering that I am living with 10 (soon to be 11) really wonderful people. Oh, another minor inconvience is having to answer the question "How was your day?" 10 times daily when my day really was not so hot. But that's good for me. I'm learning to express my feelings (a little bit at a time) and not just pretend everything's OK. I just barely had my classroom ready for the first day, but all in all, it looks pretty good. I'm still not 100% pleased with the layout, so I might move some things around one of these days. It's pretty crowded, which may be the cause ...

Hi everyone! I'm going to use this blog to chronicle my adventures this year living in Wilmington, DE, and teaching kindergarten at the UrbanPromise School. I'm sure I'll have lots of interesting stories by the time the school year is over. If you don't know much about UrbanPromise, you should check out their website . Basically, it's an inner-city ministry that works to help children and youth grow spiritually and academically to become the next generation of Christian leaders. It's pretty awesome, and it has had a huge impact on my life already (I worked as a summer intern for Urban Promise Camden in 2007). School starts on the 3rd, and I have a lot of accomplish before then, namely setting up my classroom, which was a storage area last year. It needs some TLC. But hopefully I can get it looking fabulous and developmentally appropriate for the first day of school! :) By the way, my blog is named after my favorite song ever. It's called "This Too Shal...