In process, always learning and practicing

Saturday, April 16, 2011

I am at elementary school so the topics that this site offered were just a little too mature for my little ones, but I liked a lot of them and had I been working with 11-13 year olds I would have been able to foster some great conversations and writing: http://www.tweentribune.com/content/tweentribune-classroom

When I did teach that age group, I predominately used movies, first my favorite legends and fairy tails, then movies on the topics that they were studying in their regular education classrooms, grade level curriculum. I would pre-teach some of the vocabulary that they would need, and we would stop the movie to check for understanding. Students would do their best to summarize and at first, I had to do a lot of think aloud and write as I spoke, adding the most important or enduring vocabulary. Then I would make a "cloze passage" removing every fifth or sixth word. I would list the missing words at the bottom of the page and they were expected to write the word in their native language (mostly Spanish speakers where I am and one Chinese family that would have to check that themselves, because I don't know Chinese, yet).
We used the same piece of writing to practice speaking and I would teach how a sentence can be made into a number of different questions.

Why did I do that? Because I couldn't find materials 20 years ago that appealed to that age group! They loved playing pictionary and hang-man with the vocabulary. Come to think of it, that was really fun. My older kids might like to do that.

Saturday, March 12, 2011

Tuner for the guitar

www.howtotuneaguitar.org

Monday, February 14, 2011

second grade transition and kindergarten phonemic game

At the beginning of January I started to transition the dozen or so kids that are still reading the Houghton Mifflin Lectura series in Spanish into English. We started with the Visualizing and Verbalizing structure words that we had been doing for writing and I modeled the English every other day. Then at the end of January, at the beginning of the second semester, I quit the daily writing. Now we read the story from the basal in Spanish and discuss the meaning of words and follow the questioning strategies that are in the teacher's manual and that's pretty much all the Spanish they will get until we have read the story twice and I ask them to write a journal entry about the story or something the story made them think about.

Then the other half of their time we are reading English from the Early Success series. I chose the first level so that they could hear the rhythm and rhyme. On Fridays and Mondays all year, they have been doing Zip Zoom and have "graduated" to RAZ kids. Most of the kids have finished level 3 of Zip Zoom by second grade and are ready. I feel pressured to exit kids from Spanish if they can read and understand well so that they can get started with the dominant culture's language. What I find is that the students that aren't exited are often the ones that have some kind of learning issue. They don't hear all the sounds in Spanish (L1=first language) which is completely phonetic, and then they end up struggling in English (L2=second language) too, because they don't hear all the sounds in this language, either.

For intervention for the kindergarteners, (groups of five or six) I have adopted the practice of using little plastic toys that they name. I use about a dozen items that sit on the desk in front of me. I have plastic tiles that I touch (kids are facing me, so I go right to left) as I say the sounds in the words. In the beginning after I say all the sounds, if I don't get any response as to which item I might have said, I go back and group the tiles in the syllables. I have tried a number of different ways to respond and I like to switch it up. The first time I did it, I allowed the students that thought they knew to say it. Then I started handing out the plastic toys and if they had two toys they couldn't say the word anymore. For a couple of weeks now, I have been trying another response so that they don't just "shout out" the answer, I have them listen to the sounds and put their thumbs up if they think they know the word, I count to three and they say the word in a chorus. I see who is leading and following. It is the same kids that didn't get two toys right away. The game is that with five year olds, someone always forgets and blurts out the answer, so I put the toy back in the bucket for "me" and if no one shouts out, "they" get the toys in front of them.

If you read this and you think you would try something that has worked for me, please write me a message. I am fairly certain, I am mostly writing this to myself and processing what I have done that seems to be fun and working too.

http://ksquirkyteacher.wordpress.com/2011/02/14/tips-from-the-super-organized/

Thursday, December 9, 2010

Visualizing and Verbalizing-Nanci Bell

I have been adapting a technique from the book Visualizing and Verbalizing by Nanci Bell to improve writing in my Spanish lit group. In a nutshell, Nanci presents one method so that students are able to use their mind's eye to visualize and their oral vocabulary to talk about the gestalt, or main idea, of a topic. It starts out using basic pictures that progressively get more detailed, then moves through imaging words, single sentences, various sentences, paragraphs and pages. I work with eight year olds and after one quarter we continue to work with the pictures and begin imaging words.

Her method uses twelve structure words that students learn so that they can be more precise in their overall understanding. I have translated them into Spanish: what=qué, size=tamaño, color=color, number=número, shape=forma, where=dónde, movement=movimiento, mood=humor o sentimiento, background=fondo, perspective=perspectivo, when=cuándo, and sound=sonido.

I use the simple pictures to introduce how to talk about nouns using the structure words. (I don't introduce perspective and movement in the beginning.) I ask the class to discuss at their table groups how they would talk about the size (and then other structure words) and give about a minute for them to come up with an idea. I have made it my mission to be aware of which students are doing most of the talking at their table groups and I ask the ones who did less talking to report to me what their table group came up with. When I am first introducing this I write their main ideas on the board, but I phase that out so that I can beging to see which students can write accurately, independently. After we have discussed the topic of the day (the picture) I set a time for 8 minutes. When the timer goes off, I ask them to read what they wrote and listen to see if it makes sense. I will often quote a workshop presentor, Ms. Barnaby, and say, "Revise with your ears, and edit with your eyes." I have to explain that to them more than once.

The two pictures are the same student's writing about one month apart. I see similar results in volume of writing from the majority of my group. The first picture shows that she ran out of ideas and had time to draw a picture of the cupcake (pastel). The second picture is about a month later after writing daily. She was able to continue to write for the entire time on the topic of elephant (elefante). This student does not write consonant blends independently, but she has improved in how much she can stay on task when asked to write about a topic.

Saturday, December 4, 2010

Lego Robotics FLL competition

Today the fourth and fifth graders had their first experience with competing in the Body Forward missions. My first year as coach. 8/9 rookies. Here are a few things that I learned.

*Bring extra food
*Do at least two team building activities ahead of time
*Have a group do research for the project
*Practice exact placing of the robots in home base quickly

In the missions, we got the second highest score of the day and that was the highest in that round. That was one quarter of the total score. I thought they were awesome and I'll post pictures as soon as some parents get them to me. My camera battery died. Oh,

*charge the batteries in all technology, not just the robots and the laptops.