Week Four 3/9/16

Hello everyone! I hope that you are all having a wonderful spring break and a good week of rest. Since I had nothing planned for this week, I thought I might as well go to SEEDs and continue my internship. And it was a good thing I did!

This week everyone was working very diligently to finish a lot of products for this Saturday’s event! Because of all of the chaos, Mary Ann  gave me more responsibility and more hands-on work. This was my first week as a substitute instructor. I had two classes, each with two students.

In the morning painting class, I had Ricardo and Alex. Both have a tendency to wander off, both physically and mentally, and requires me to constantly remind them to keep focus. Alex has clear verbal skills when he is directed to answer questions, but likes scripting and singing to himself. Ricardo has a much more difficult time communicating and has small to minimal communication skills. He says a word or two occasionally, but usually self-talks. In the class, I had to teach both of them how to make long brushstrokes to make a cleaner finish on whatever we were painting (in this case, pots). I appointed Ricardo to the gold layer and Alex to the black layer. Both struggled with being neat, so I had to come up with a way to teach both of them how to make straighter lines.

Alex was using a much larger brush because he had to paint a larger surface area. The large brush was giving him a hard time to make the line between the black and gold not overlap. I looked at Alex and had to keep asking if he was paying attention. When he made eye contact with me I would show him how to move the paint slowly, so that the black wouldn’t go onto the gold. His tendency to paint quickly made his work uneven and inconsistent, so his key term I gave him was “slow.” As he eased his brushstrokes, his hand became steady and his lines improved. Ricardo had the same issue of painting too quickly; however, I couldn’t have a conversation with him because of his lack of concentration. With Ricardo, I put my hand over his to physically show how he should paint. I was saying words like, “slow, calm, soft, etc.” and he caught on to the word “soft” very quickly. So whenever, I caught him painting too rashly I would say “softer” and he would understand.

The pots Alex and Ricardo were painting

In the afternoon, I worked with Andy and Alex. The three of us had to create labels for the finished ceramics. This required stamping, writing, and taping. Since Andy has good handwriting, I put him in charge of writing the dollar amount on the labels. I told Alex to stamp and tape the labels onto the products. This system was working fine until Andy had an unexpected appointment and had to leave. I then tested if Alex had good penmanship and told him to start doing the writing. He impressed both Mary Ann and I with his handwriting and I made him do all three steps for the rest of the class period.

Thanks for reading and talk to you guys soon!

Grace