For my academic internship this year I chose to be an assistant for Mr. Oliver's 5th grade class at High Tech Explorer where I've been helping around the class to support and supervise his students. My mentor Oliver is very kind and supportive towards me as I get adjusted to working in his class, and his students have also been really fun to work with, even if they do tend to get a bit rowdy during the day. Each day I'm tasked with watching over the kids as they work on their assignments to make sure they stay focused, supporting them if they ask me a question or ever get stuck on something, and helping my mentor out with any other tasks around the classroom. A moment that stood out for me this week was getting to personally assist a student (who was dyslexic) with some math work they were struggling on, this was a significant moment for me because it showed how I supportive I was towards them as I calmly helped them out. Something that surprised me this week was getting to know that my friend Annabelle was also working as an intern as a teachers assistant at HTeX in another classroom. Overall this first week went very well for me, I really enjoyed getting to be a part of the classroom and helping everyone out, and I hope I'll have as much fun with everyone next week too!

 In my previous blog post I explained why I chose my growth question to be "improving my ability to communicate with the students and support them in a meaningful way" since I didn't really personally communicate a lot with the other volunteers at the museum during my time working there. Throughout this week in class, I've made a lot of progress towards improving myself in my growth question by actively supporting any students who seem to be struggling or off task and helping them out in any way I can on their assignments. If I were to make significant progress on improving my growth question over the course of this internship it would give me better understanding on the behaviors of these students and how to properly support them in completing their work. And I have put my time sheet for this week on screen for you to see.