Internship - Blog #5

3. You are half-way through your project. How is it going? What challenges have you faced? What have you learned? What are you doing to ensure a successful completion of your internship project.

---

During my internship, I've worked on multiple smaller projects instead of one large one, and, so far, each one is going smoothly. One such project is working with a few of the lower level kids with their work, and spending additional time reading and playing games with them to ensure they are learning various vocabulary. One issue I faced in this project was that the bingo cards they played with were too small, and they completed the games far too quickly, and so a typed up a larger, 5x5 bingo card that would take them longer to finish. They seem to be benefiting from the help I am giving them, and, since the project is really open-ended, in order to ensure a successful completion of this project, I'm just going to keep working with them on a daily basis and watch the quality of their work improve.

Another project that I am working on is photographing the class throughout my stay, and, in the end, putting the images onto a CD for the kids to take home with them. I have finished taking the pictures at this point, and will begin sorting them into folders for each kid, and burn them onto the CDs. There haven't been many challenges in this project, except for making sure I get enough photos of each student. Because the little girls were so eager to be photographed and always had me taking pictures of them, I barely had any of the boys in the beginning. Eventually, I got more of the male students, and enough of them all to make a nice collection. I will know I have successfully completed this project when all of the CDs have been burned and labeled correctly.

A final project that I am working on is teaching the first graders how to use an iPod Touch. The school that I am interning at, Alpine Elementary, will soon be getting in a shipment of iPods that all of the classrooms will have access to, and so my mentor wants to make sure that her students understand how to properly use them. I have been teaching the students on my iPod Touch, and they have treated it very carefully and gently, which is better than I expected of them. They seem eager to get a chance to use it, and quickly learn what to do with it. The main challenge of this project has been finding free, grade-level-appropriate applications, that are both educational and easy to understand. I've gone through online databases trying to find apps that fall in that category, but still haven't been able to find many. Another challenge is choosing which apps for the students to use when I work with them, because they are all at different levels, and what's easy for one kid might me difficult for another. Like my first project, this is somewhat open-ended, but I feel that as long as I keep working with the students and make sure that they are understanding what I am teaching them, this will have been a successful project.