Essay #1 My team consists of three members including myself. We were assigned to a first grade class at Foshay Learning Center. Since, I have worked with children before and my experience will be really useful when trying to teach these children the aspect we learn in our Geology 108: Crises of a Planet class. I worked for a non-profit organization called Boys and Girls Club where we had grades Pre-k until eighth grade. I know well what my first graders were capable of doing and learning and I will use that for the students here. I had mixed emotions for a first time observation session. As we walked into the school we saw that it was quite different that the school I went to. It was surrounded by a poor community, which made me make certain judgments. As we walked into the classroom I noticed that it was quite messy and small. The teacher introduced us to the class and had us sit in the back and observe her lesson. The teacher did not really have a place for us to sit and one of my team members had to stand. The teacher does not do a well job organizing her room, therefore, stuff were piled on top of each other. As for the kids, they were vey welcoming, cute, and shy. The kids were very engaged and the teacher made sure she repeated everything many times. I was quite surprised when I saw that the room was messy. The students had to share their supplies with their table partners. I concluded that they did not have a great budget for getting supplies for the children. In this case, we will be providing most of the supplies. The students were really excited when they got to see that they were going to play with play-doh. This was a brilliant idea; the kids were well behaved when we passed out the dough. They listened to instructions as well as not fooling around with the dough. The kids seemed to get bored when the teacher was teaching, even though they were engaging with repetition of the words they were learning. The activity was not hands on, I think as a first grade class it is really important to have everybody engage in the activity