The first month at school.

This year has turned out to be a quite special one for me! Luckily, I can share everything with an excellent sister teacher, who is also my friend, who is willing to share her wisdom and expertise with me full time: Miss Dai! Besides, the group I have makes of every afternoon an opportunity to learn, have fun and give and receive love ans thankfulness. I love my children in 5th Green so much!!! It's such a pleasure to accompany them in every sptep they take. 
Changing the year you teach is always a challenge, and I got to find out that I enjoy working with the age group I'm teaching this year a lot! It was a lease of fresh air.
In this first post, I'd like to share an activity we did today. Students played the role of reporters and interviewees at the meeting's room (where we have tea parties) so as to make it look "real" hahaha. They brough special clothing and we recorded their work so as to upload it to edmodo and give their families the opportunity to see and enjoy their children in action. 
The students were really motivated and excited about acting and the activity proved to be a great chance to practise question formation and giving answers appropiately. We also worked on the format of the interview by analysing extracts from real interviews we watched with the beamer and, as the actors from the "best" interview from each form will be in charge of interviewing 6th formers about the solidarity campaign the did last year, the kids were really motivated to perform accurately so as to be "the reporters". 
When the recording took place, they kids were a bit nervous and they did make mistakes which are characteric of the situation they were undergoing and whihc they had not done during the "rehearsing" period, but the experience turned to be fantastic. Now, it's time for us to go on practising question formation, but it was a great springboard to start working on the topic.

Miss Ceci

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