Olivia

Teaching practices 1

This year, taking into consideration the group I have, I decided to (or at least try to!) include all the learning styles in every single lesson planned, and it seems to be showing good results! I am doing my best to include kinesthetic, visual and auditory aspects in an integrated way everyday.

When time for planning came, I found that, taking into consideration the fact that one of my students can see very, very little and that most of the children found it hard to remain sitting down for a long pediod of time, it was a must to include catchy, funny and visually motivating activities as well as activities which imply moving around and doing things with the body in order to learn. Besides, some children seem to do much better when dealing with oral activities.

It was not easy at the very beginnig (and we are still learning how to cope with these changes) because this implies more noisy and less structured classroom dynamics, but we seem to be on the right track. Students are friendly and willing to learn and they have enjoyed the activities a lot!

I think that it is a challenge for us (teachers) to change some aspects of our teching, taking into consideration the children we ARE teaching, who do not seem to share much with us when we were kids. This implies that, most likely, the way we learned may not be the way in which THEY will learn best.

Sometimes I find that we set our minds on finishing the lesson plan or having all the copybooks corrected in time, instead of thinking of or reflecting on the way our students need to be taught.

I hope I can go on working this issue out and come up with better activities which promote real effective learning.

Ceci