This program gave me a lot of things, new experiences, new friendships, new lessons, and new plans for my future. After teaching third graders at El Camino del Río Elementary school, five thorough prepared lessons from a curriculum that we as a team edited and developed, leading three field trips to third, fourth and fifth graders in groups of nine to ten students I can say I caught myself getting better and more confident every time we facilitated a new lesson.

I started I remember it was Wednesday April 10th, I felt so nervous, and I caught myself just speeding through the lesson and talking as fast as I could. My teammates were my biggest support system and they wanted me to do better, they immediately called out how fast I was talking. I relaxed myself and started over. There was a moment where I felt like I didn’t have any control of the classroom because the classroom management strategies that I was using were not getting my students attention. I knew since the first time facilitating my lesson, that I needed to work on being calm during the lesson and classroom management, especially when it came to me bringing back my students’ attention after having them do an activity. I taught my lessons in Spanish but not all the kids are fluent in Spanish, and I realized it because when I have instructions some kids looked confused and lost. I realized I needed to give instructions in either both languages, or one at a time, my students need were being met by me, their teacher. 

As the weeks went by, I started realizing how I had the classrooms attention easier than I did before after I implemented the resources that Maestro Juan, my third-grade classroom Spanish teacher, he had a timer clock that rang when the timer was over, and it always got my students attention back. He gave me different classroom management practices such as “Waterfall, waterfall” and my student went “shhh”, or “pam pa ra pam pam” and the student would go “pam pam”. I worked also during all these lessons to make my instructions very clear so my students wouldn’t get confused and that also came in hand with me telling my students how much time they were going to have for each assignment. I caught myself on the last lesson putting in practice all of techniques that I knew my students responded to, I was talking slower when the lessons started, and the lessons just went on smoother. We were having fun, and I grew a lot as an environmental educator.