First Day of School!

Today was the first day of school, and let me start off by saying that I am absolutely exhausted!

I guess I should back up and introduce myself. Howdy! I'm Mrs. Duke, and I am currently a graduate student at the University of Arkansas working on my Master's degree of Arts in Teaching! I graduated this past May with my Bachelor's degree in Childhood Education. My dream is to be the best teacher out there; the one that all the students remember for their whole lives!

I live by this quote! :)

I am interning in a kindergarten class until October, and my mentor teacher is quite possibly an older (not by much) version of myself!  We started last week by getting the classroom ready as well as going to meetings and trainings. There was so much to do to get the little kiddos ready to enter the great big world of Elementary School! I decided that I'm pretty awesome at writing "kindergarten style."

Just a little taste of my awesome skills!

So back to today. I can only sum up today's experience in three words (definitely stole this from my friend who is now a real kindergarten teacher): I am alive! Yup, that is about how I feel right now!
I started off the day today by attempting to make a "green smoothie" with spinach and apples that is supposed to be healthy and help with detoxing your body. Sounds like a great, yummy plan, right? Wrong. I definitely put way too much spinach in the blender because it tasted like I was drinking a tree! Needless to say, that smoothie will be a trial-by-error but eventually I hope to get it right!
Today went by so fast! I had forgotten about the fact that with kindergartners, you have to teach them all of the rules and procedures because obviously, they have not been to school before. I will say, with confidence because my mentor teacher and I are that awesome, we only had one crier - and the chid stopped after about a minute. Somewhere between the five minutes I got for lunch, playing "whack-a-mole" with the kids on the carpet, and standing on my feet all day, I completely reaffirmed that I wanted to be a teacher. I couldn't be happier with the group of kids that I have the privilege to watch grow, mature, and thrive in kindergarten until October! 

We obviously had a lot of cute and funny things that went on today, but my favorite had to be in the car line after school. A little girl asked me why my name was Mrs. Duke. Honestly, I'm not even sure where to begin telling a little five year old about how I got my last name, but I do know that she was extremely adamant that Duke was a boy's name.. or a dog's name - of which I am neither! So funny! We also had a little let down with the recess equipment. The principal decided it would be better if we kept yellow "caution" tape on all of the equipment on the playground for the first day of school, and open a new piece each day. The kids were so incredibly distraught that they weren't allowed to play on the slide that most of them decided that playing in dirt just had to be the only thing left to do (in their defense, there was enough dirt for it to be a sandbox!). You could say that all us awesome teachers felt bad for the poor kiddos, because we ended up just letting them play in the dirt (of course, they only have about a 20 minute "outdoor physical activity" time, so they weren't in the dirt long - no worries!)!

Well, it is time for me to hit the sack - to wake up and do it all again tomorrow! What a great life! 

And that's the way the cookie crumbles,

Definitely appropriate.