Last Visit 11/15/07

Well, I finally completed the nine visits and the fifteen hours for VIPS. Before I arrived to my last visit today, I was thinking that I didn’t want to give up the VIPS badge. I liked that red ribbon that was tied onto the badge. The badge also had field trip information on the back. In case it got lost, it would get sent back to the school address. On the front was information to let others in the school know that I was a VIPS volunteer there. I was thinking, too, about all my past visits and that I was going to miss everyone there. I finally got the courage to make that one last visit. For the first time, today’s class started off with a science experiment that they were continuing. They learned that colors are actually a mixture of several pigments. The kids were amazed to see the different colors (pigments) from ink on the special filter paper. When the teacher turned on the overhead for the Math lesson, one of the students noticed that the light seemed to create a rainbow on the paper. One was with lots of pinks and purplish colors and the other was with blue, green, and yellow. For their Math lesson they were working on separating things into categories. An example would be: Where did Ms. Cutter’s 3rd grade class like to eat?—either indoosr or outdoors would be the categories. They also looked at a bar graph and did line plots. Ms. Chippis was going to hand out their report cards when I gave my thank-you presents to her and the students. Ms. Chippis’ mouth dropped wide open when she saw the white board and the pencils along with the grips and erasers to go with it. I passed out the pencils to everyone while someone else in the class passed out the others. I saw the new eraser tips on their pencils when I looked if everyone got some. I also got my disposition paper back and the kids got their report cards. Ms. Chippis said that I can come back anytime I want to, to help out or just to help myself in my teaching journey. Counting down the last few minutes and then it was “love, sweet love!” just like one of the songs that they play at the end of the day instead of using bells. :)