To start off, I have to say that practicum has been super fun so far, I absolutely love my teacher mentor and the children in our classroom! My whole practicum experience has been such a humbling time of practice, patience, and learning on my end, and I am so thankful for that, and I can’t wait to see how much I will grow as a teacher and student in the next practicum. In week 2, I did my lesson plan based off the idea that we would be teaching the students about what an author and illustrator does, so through a very highly modeled lesson, the students made their own pumpkin books where they were the author, and the illustrator. The students are working really hard on their printing right now so we did some work as “word detectives” which allowed the students to be able to label their pumpkins. I had decided to take a huge risk with this lesson plan by trying to do something very intricate, something outside of the students comfort zones (they haven’t done anything like this before with their teacher), and a huge risk for me because I have never taught kindergarten before. It paid off, the lesson went amazing. All the prep I did for the lesson plan (which was a lot) was all worth it. The children were so engaged, focused, and overall they were very interested in the material, and it really showed in their work, and their work ethic during the activity. So like I mentioned, I was so happy with how it went, which was great, but it also reinforced to me how much work I have to keep putting in my lesson plans in order to find a way to interest the students. It isn’t even just interesting the students that was important. I think a big reason the children did well was because the activity was quite challenging, and the students pushed themselves to do their best work because they wanted to be able to do it.  This was my “aha” moment, I realized that students needed to be pushed outside their comfort zones and challenged, just as adults do. I was scared that the students weren’t going to be able to be “word detectives” and then write the words down to label their own pumpkins, but the students were all so excited about the work that they challenged themselves to do their best work. The students really supposed me with how much they could do, I created and prepped a lot of materials for students that I wasn’t sure how they were going to respond/react to the lesson plan, and I didn’t end up using and of my UDL supports from my lesson plan which blew me away! All the kindergartners were resilient, our students that we notice having behavioral difficulties and our student with an IEP all completed the same work as the rest of the class without having to use and of the universal designs for learning or differentiate instructions that I planned for the lesson which was a huge win in my books!