Friday Rain =[ Entry #20

Friday November 28, 2008

The end of a long week…

(I've added some more pictures from our Seville trip, just to help break up a long blog entry...=] They are not new from this week)

Today I finished my fractions lesson in math. I kind of gave a final assessment today. I would have liked to call it a test – but IB doesn’t really believe in tests. Anyway, it will help me assess what they have learned as well as my teaching. In the assessment there were questions on using drawings to represent fractions, work with improper fractions and mixed numbers, simplifying and ordering so the questions fit perfectly with the objectives I was trying to accomplish over the last week.
In the afternoon I taught a two hour POI block on formal and informal writing. Ms. Lisa did a formal observation on this lesson and gave me feedback at the end of the day. The central idea being addressed in this lesson was “write a persuasive letter to the government (formal) and one to your parents (informal) so that they will not force you to evacuate. To introduce this assignment I did a one hour lesson on formal and informal writing, and then the students were allowed to start their writing. I created my lesson using the SMART notebook software. After the students came in from lunch I had the question “Why do we write letters?” written on the SMART board. We brainstormed possible reasons for writing letters. Some answers were to communicate, express an idea/opinion/attitude, to ask for something, invite someone to something or thank someone. The next slide I created was entitled Formal Writing. I explained that this meant that it was very professional, like a business letter. Underneath the title I had a list of qualifications that were necessary in a formal letter but there were covered up by a psychedelic highlighter. If the students could identify one of the qualifications on the list they could come up to the SMART board and erase/”rub out” the highlighting to reveal the answer. For example a few of the qualifications were: the letter needs to be typed, it needs a letterhead, the letter must have the date, your address and the address of the recipient, it must be polite, well presented, clear and to the point, and there should be no slang, contractions, emotive language, questions or spelling errors. The students were extremely excited. Its amazing how you can totally engage students by incorporating erasing of colored marker into an academic lesson…cool, I’ll take it. The next slide was titled Informal Writing. The students had to complete a similar task, revealing certain things that would be acceptable to have in an informal letter. In the next slide of the lesson I had a list of phrases that you might use in an informal letter. The students had to match the phrase with their meaning in the adjacent column. For example the students could match “could you do something for me” with “asking a favor,” or “did you know that” with “to share information.” To complete the matching I had the students raise their hand if they spotted a match, I then proceeded to call on a student and throw the SMART board pen to them across the room to them. They caught the marker and drew a connecting line on the board between the two phrases. The idea of a teacher tossing markers around the classroom to the students skyrocketed the already high student participation. Even the students who never participate were totally engaged in the lesson. This just goes to prove that if you use effective age appropriate strategies you can make any lesson engaging and active…even learning about different writing styles à yawn. After the lesson today I was really excited, its days like today that make me re-think my decision of not teaching right away. I think I really could have fun given the flexibility of my own classroom. Not quite sure Ms. Lisa was crazy about me chucking markers across the room though =] haha. So…total bummer about going to Morocco. Dawn, Brittany and I had plans this weekend to go to Morocco for three days. It sounded like an amazing trip. Meals and a four star hotel were included with tours and shopping around three cities. Luckily we had not paid in advance for the trip. We had all been watching the weather and thunderstorms and heavy rain were listed as the weekend forecast in Tangier. We were contemplating still going and chalking it up as one wet adventure, but we opted to make the ‘adult’ decision and not go. We had heard that the sewer system in Morocco isn’t the greatest and it is really easy for cities to flood. In addition, we did not want to get stuck in Morocco in traffic or not be able to make the ferry back to Gibraltar on Sunday to make it to school on Monday…that would have been a disaster! We are hoping that maybe we will be able to organize a day trip or something there before we leave with some staff members. It won’t as cool as the three day trip, but it would still be nice to go since we are so close. Our plan B included going to get coffee with Mireille tonight then laying low at home. It was actually really nice. I have been able to catch up on some blog entries as well as get a lot of grading done that I had to do this weekend. No idea how I would have gotten it all done had I not got home from Morocco until six o’clock on Sunday. I graded thirteen math packets that I had handed out as a challenge for my advanced math students. I also graded twenty fraction assessments and made comments for editing on twenty-six formal and informal letters. **There were some perks to grading tonight**

Informal and Formal letter examples:

Informal Example #1:
Dear Mum and Dad,
I really miss you! Everyone here is being mean to all the evacuees. Me and Max were one of the last children to be picked. Luckily in the end, someone just wanted one girl or one buy. We tried and in the end, the lady took us both in. They own a barbershop and sometimes they let us help.
My new school is ok. One of the kids in my class is Kate, remember Kate? We’ve become best friends. There are some awful bullies in the class under me, but above Max, Guess what!? Max skipped a grade!!! Isn’t that exciting? He is now only two classes below me!
How is Dad in the Navy? Has he come back? Is he still alive? Please tell me!

When are you coming??? I really miss you!

Love, Emily

P.S. How are you doing with the shelter? Are you SAFE?

Informal Example #2 (Haha, Jamal overdid the informal lingo a bit…but I think he grasped the concept ;)

Dear Mum,
I just so so so so don’t want to go! It makes me feel sad, miserable and stuff like that! I’d feel like killin’ myself, besides I mean I’m sure I’ll be safe with u. There isn’t like a big reason why I gotta go! Ahh! This make me so afraid.

Love,
Jamal Shagig

PS: Please say no!

**The funny thing is that this example is from an amazing student with very proper English…he meant for the letter to sound like this**

Formal Example #1:
12 May 1947

Mr. John Spencer
Organization of evacuees
London Government
39, Pembrook Avenue
CHISWICK

Dear Sir,

I would be grateful if you would allow me to stay and live with my parents.

I would like to stay because I would feel uncomfortable leaving London and my parents will be in danger.

Also, I hate the thought of maybe living with someone who doesn’t like me.

Thank you for considering me. I hope that this letter will change your mind about evacuees.

Yours Faithfully,

(signed name)

Ellie Perry
I also got quite a laugh from one of my answers on the extended math packet, Dan à you will enjoy this.

I asked the students to create their own word problem for 525 ÷ 21 and then solve it.

This is what Andrew wrote (he is a very bright student and one of the class clowns)

“100 people are in a school. 525 people are wearing school jumpers (aka sweatshirts). 21 people are just wearing the shirts. How many people are wearing raincoats?”

Hahahaha. Oh, Andrew. I have no idea if this was a joke, or he was serious, or didn’t think I would read it or what, but Dawn and I laughed pretty hard about it.

…and now I’m going to head to bed. Funny how I am most productive on a Friday night when nothing is due the next day, seems a little bit backwards.

Tomorrow we hope to go out for breakfast, maybe stop by the Christmas bazaar at SIS in the afternoon and then head to Estapona for the night. Not a bad plan B for the weekend...=]

HAPPY THANKSGIVING! Entry #19

This morning was the big assembly. The beginning of the day was a little stressful because I did not have time to run through the story with the students reading their parts because so many students were leaving for activities. I wanted to get to school a little early to get everything set up, but that backfired because the bus was late. I ended up getting to school at 9:00 when we usually get to school at 8:45ish. I ran up to my classroom and got the students who would be helping me with the presentation. I also grabbed a couple of needed extra copies of the script for those students could not find their script or it “fell in a puddle.”

I brought my laptop to the theater where the assembly would be held in hopes of playing the Japanese Sakura Cherry Blossom song I had downloaded the night before while the students did a paper crane folding demonstration. I thought the song might be nice to break the silence while the students worked. Little did I know, Christian, the IT employee who was helping me set up the PowerPoint on the large projector said that he not only needed my zip drive, but also my laptop. I did not have time to figure out how to explain to someone how to play the song from my laptop up in the special effects booth or how to get it to play over the speakers. Oh well, scratch that idea.

Christian told me that he had a remote that I could use for the PowerPoint but that one of my students needed to run and get it from the office. Then he also told me that I might need my power cord and adapter incase my computer died during the presentation. This request took about five minutes for me to understand because Christina doesn’t speak English. I don’t know my technology terms in Spanish…so I finally grabbed a student to help translate the problem. I briefly left the students in the theater, ran back to the primary building, grabbed my charger and adapter and ran back. What a start.

The students and staff would be coming down to the theater at 9:20 and we still needed to run through the script. I lined up the students in front of the screen; however it was difficult for all of the students to fit so I had some of them standing on boxes. Of course, this caused a MAJOR issue, because they all wanted to stand on the boxes. After getting the excited students settled we ran through the story. I made sure to emphasize that they needed to speak loudly, clearly, and slowly. I also wanted them to step forward when they were saying their part and try to make eye contact at least once during their part. Some of the students did this brilliantly during the presentation, others I thought were hard to hear.

In no time, the year 3,4,5 and 6 students and staff began to filter in to the assembly. It was nice that the music lady played a CD at this time. I walked over to her and asked if she could start the CD again when the two students demonstrated folding the paper cranes. It was no “Sakura,” but it kind of had an oriental sound to it.

Despite the stressful and hectic preparation for the assembly it went very well. The staff and students enjoyed the “Good Morning” song and dance, the story of Sadako and her cranes, as well as the origami demonstration. Ms. Lisa filmed the assembly and I am going to try and transfer to tape to a DVD. This will be fun to watch later.

Even though the assembly was over I still had a very busy day ahead of me. I was finishing up my fractions unit in math. Today we talked about equivalent fractions and hot to cross-multiply to check if two fractions were equivalent. We also talked about how we can order fractions with different denominators by using common knowledge and pictures instead of changing the fraction to have a common denominator. After explaining this process we played a fun game that gave the students practice ordering fractions. I called it the “Pizza Game,” yes real original, I know. The students all had individual white boards and they were working in pairs. We chose partners from our newly created clock partner sheets. The students drew a clock on a white piece of paper and had partners sign their name at different times on the clock. So I would find a friend and say, will you be my 12 o’clock partner, they say yes, sign their name at 12 on my sheet and I sign my name at their 12. For other activities that require randomly selected partners I could use the clock partner’s sheet. For example: for this activity find your 5 o’clock partner.

To play the “Pizza Game,” one student rolls the die and writes the first number they get on their white board as the numerator. The same student rolls the die again and writes the second number as the denominator of their fraction. Then the student needed to draw a picture of their fraction. For example they may have to draw 4/6ths. They ate 4 out of 6 slices of pizza. Then the second player does the same thing. The player that eats the most slices of pizza gets a tick mark. The students played up to three and then switched partners. The game challenged all of the students, especially when they rolled an improper fraction. For example they rolled a 6 first and then a 3. If they draw the pictures correctly they should eat three whole pizzas.

After math we had break and then I started my second lesson. This was a language/POI lesson on evacuees. The students have been studying evacuees for the past few weeks through film and articles. The central idea of this lesson was, “Using evacuee photographs, produce a skit in which students can communicate in powerful ways an understanding of their feelings and emotions towards the plight of evacuees.” (yes very wordy, I thought so too) As a class we watched a quick video that I found on the BBC websites

(http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/worldwars/wwtwo/launch_ani_wwtwo_movies_evacuees.html

and looked at pictures of children being evacuated during WWII. The students were asked to pay close attention to the different experiences and facial expressions of the children. Some children in the pictures thought they were going on a holiday and were smiling; others must have had a clearer understanding of the circumstance and looked very sad. After lunch we returned to the lesson, I got the students in groups. Each group was going to produce a drama on a different part of the evacuation process so that all of the skits didn’t end up the same. One group did their skit on saying goodbye to their parents before being evacuated. Another group did their skit on coming back home, another while they were on the train etc. The dramas were pretty good, some groups did an excellent job. One group even had two of the children speaking German and the other two translating it into English…so cool. My assessment of the activity was more heavily weighted on how the students worked together in groups instead of the presentation. I explained to the students that I would be walking around doing a quick informal assessment of how well they were working in groups. Most students did just fine.

Funny story about this lesson, the last time I was discussing doing a drama for an assignment, Ms. Harland kept calling a skit a “sketch.” I had never used this term for a drama, but just assumed that that’s what the English call a skit. So while explaining this assignment I kept calling it a sketch. It wasn’t until I saw a couple of groups asking if they could use markers for their sketch that I realized not everyone calls a skit a “sketch.” They thought that they had to do a drawing, ha. Even after explaining there were different settings and characters – they thought I meant a piece of art, duh. Wow, talk about miscommunication, and the sad thing is…we aren’t even speaking a different language.

After school it was raining so football practice was canceled. I stayed after with Mireille and forced myself to finish a standard.

Mireille contacted at least a dozen restaurants/hotels to see if we could get a turkey to celebrate Thanksgiving but it didn’t work out. If it would have been possible, she would have gotten one, but it didn’t happen. We settled for going out for dinner together. Olive, Sam, and Mireille joined “The Americans,” for dinner at the “Irish” pub, haha. It was nice of them to celebrate with us, but I think we all definitely missed the family and food! I think that this year is the first I have gone without pumpkin pie. =] Told my mom we need to have a make up Thanksgiving dinner on Christmas!

Tomorrow is Friday! =]

Journal Entry #18

Wednesday November 26, 2008

The house was a little lonely this morning without Dan sitting in our living room, rearing to go!

This morning I was lucky enough to have two open periods before I began to teach for the remainder of the day. My students were at PE first hour and then they had Spanish. During this time I went to the cafeteria, got a coffee and started work. I don’t know what it is about the coffee in the SIS cantina (caf) but it kind of made me crazy! I thought there was only one espresso shot in it, but I had one yesterday before leaving school and I had so much energy I needed to go for a run. This morning I felt like I was on super-work mode. I accomplished so much, which is good, but not quire sure whatever is in the coffee is healthy or safe for me, haha oops.

During my work time I prepared for the year three through six assembly that I will be leading tomorrow morning. All of the primary staff of these years as well as Sue, head of primary, and Chris, head of SIS will be attending. I am going to have the year six students join me in teaching the rest of the students a welcoming song. There is a song and dance. We will sing together G-O-O-D-MORNING GOOD MORNING, GOOD GOOD, GOOD MORNING WOOO. It should be pretty entertaining. After teaching the students the song, I am going to talk a little bit about Thanksgiving and what we celebrate back home.

After this I will invite the students to help me tell the story of Sadako and the peace cranes. The assemblies are intended to share some of the things you have been learning in class with the rest of the school. I asked both Ms. Lisa and Ms. Hartland’s class if there were any volunteers who would help me with the assembly tomorrow to stay in before going out to recess at lunch. I had 21 students show up wanting to participate! I was not expecting this high of a turnout and had to adjust my plan, but was thrilled that the students wanted to be involved. The students will all have a few lines of the story to read along with the pictures that will be displayed on a big screen in the assembly room. At the end of the story we will have a few students who can fold paper cranes by heard do a quick demonstration.

At the end I will invite everyone to come up to our pod and check out our display of Sadako’s story, and origami peace cranes.

After planning for the assembly I taught my math lesson on fraction vocabulary. I thought it was so fun and went really well. To start the lesson I brainstormed with the students important vocabulary words the one would need to know when working with fractions. We created a web/graphic organizer on the SMART board with a list of words. In the middle of the web was the word “fractions,” and off of this circle there were a number of smaller circles that said, numerator, denominator, factors, greatest common factor, mixed number, improper fraction, simplify/reduce, common denominator, and equivalent fractions. I explained that I will assign students to work in pairs or small groups. Their task is to define the vocabulary word that they are given and give an example of the term. To explain my expectations I did an example with the word in the center of our web, “Fractions.” My definition will say, a fraction is part of a whole that is made up of equal parts. For example a circle with six equal parts. A fraction is also a part of a whole group of items, for example one of two soccer balls is blue. The fraction being represented is ½. I categorized the vocabulary words by difficulty. I gave the lower group easier words to define such as numerator and denominator. The middle group received medium difficulty terms such as mixed number and improper fractions, and I challenged the highest group to define terms such as simplify, greatest common factor and equivalent fractions.

Once the students were done writing their term, definition, and example on the white boards they needed to present their information to the class. The students came up to the front of the room group by group and explained their definition and example. It was amazing, they turned into little teachers. Even the students who never turn in their work and have difficulty with math were getting into the activity. One of the students picked up the whiteboard marker and was like, “Alright you lot, I’m going to teach you all what a denominator is so listen up. I will draw an example up on the board.” Blah blah blah “Any questions?” haha. It was great. A few of them drew their pictures and then wrote on the board drawing/definition by (their names). The questions were also great. Andrew was explaining how to simplify fractions and one of the fractions was 24/48ths. Gloria raised her hand and said, “Uh could I please see a picture representing that fraction.” Andrew was like, “uh sure.” He rapidly made a whole bunch of dots on the white board and said, “Right that’s 48, and this half of dots is 24. 24/48th is also equal to ½.”

Ms. Lisa also really liked the lesson and explained that she will be using it next year. She had one of the teacher aids type up all of the student definitions so that we can display them in the classroom. One of the IB standards that needs to be fulfilled for the math requires the students to know the vocabulary with fractions. The lesson reviewed all of the vocabulary, but in addition creating the examples required the students to do some math and explain the process of some of the tasks we have been learning in our fractions unit.

*Special thanks to Dan, who talked with me about how to wrap up my fractions unit this week…it was a hit, I’ll let you know how pizza fractions go tomorrow =]*

The afternoon remained busy as I had two more lessons to teach as well as help the students prepare their lines for the assembly tomorrow morning. I gave a short lesson to an advanced writing group. I used some of Jill Pott’s materials on the Writers Tool kit. We worked on visualizing a familiar room, writing details about the room and then expanding the details. Some of them were amazing, I mean really amazing. “The lavender sofa, splashed with a pastel flower pattern, sat longingly in the corner of the room waiting for my granddad to return from work and relax on the soft fluffy cushions.” Wow…wow.

After the writing lesson, I covered for a teacher by doing a multi-cultural lesson with a small group of students. Wednesdays is the “weird” day at SIS where a whole bunch of students leave in the afternoon for activities (horseback riding, golfing, or water sports). Students who do not pay for extra activities have alternative lessons at school. The students and I made mint tea and looked at pictures from Chefcharoun, a orphanage located in Morocco that is supported by SIS. It was my job to make connections between SIS and the kids at the orphanage, to help the students understand that the kids at the orphanage are not that different from them. While we waited for the tea to cool, we played a game similar to “Kick the Can” that the students play at the orphanage. We returned to the classroom with fifteen minutes left before the end of the school day. We drank (some students ran to the bathroom and spit out =]) the tea, and ate bisques (cookies). We also looked at some traditional clothing that the people of Morocco wear.

After school I stayed for a staff meeting on planning to write the students end of the term report cards. Wish me good luck for the assembly tomorrow morning!

Journal Entry #16 and 17

Monday and Tuesday at School

I would like to update you on the last few days, unfortunately I have had a lot of work to do for Gustavus and Sotogrande, so they will be very brief.

Monday was a typical day at school. Dan observed another math lesson, and I am transitioning into taking over all of the language courses. Right now the students are working on persuasive writing. After school I talked with Dan for a while about graduate schools. I also talked with him about how to best plan the remainder of my fractions lessons. His advice was very helpful. He also interviewed me on my propaganda lesson for his research on "cognitive load" that he is conducting with the current student teachers.


Today I accompanied the year six students on their trip to English International School in Marbella for a football tournament. It was so much time and the weather was great. It was nice to take a day away from the school to better get to know the students and their personalities outside of the classroom. I made some connections with students that I had a hard time reaching in the classroom. I got quite a few pictures and videos of the students playing - they are very talented. When I get back I hope to make an iMovie of my trip that includes my videos and pictures.

Tomorrow I teach quite a few lessons. Thursday we are hoping to get a turkey for Thanksgiving and have it at Sam and Mireille's. Mireille has done most of the work in locating one, surprise, surprise. =]

Hopefully I will find some time to write more later this week.

Miss you all back home, looking forward to seeing some familiar faces!

Dan is having NO fun in Spain

Seville!

The whole group wanted to take a trip while Dan was here and we agreed on Seville! Mireille decided to join us on the trip, and thanks to her we had a seven passenger car/van and a hostel booked for Saturday night. Way to go Mireille! I think if we took the bus to Seville we all would have been throwing up by the time we got there.

Dan, Brittany, Dawn, Riley, Mireille and I left for Seville around 9:00AM (Annika decided to stay home to catch up on standards and lesson plans). The drive was beautiful for the first hour or so passing through the mountains. There was not a cloud in sight. Our excitement about the trip was evident as we found it necessary to sing the lyrics to every song on the CD including Alanis Morissette, Pink, Anna Nalick, and The Pretenders. Even Riley joined in when Sheryl Crow came on. I never heard Dan’s voice, after the first hour he was probably regretting his decision to go on a road trip with four other girls.

It took us about two and a half hours to get to Seville. It was exciting driving through a bigger city with extravagant fountains at each roundabout. Unfortunately, locating the hostel was a bit of a challenge. We drove around the city for another half an hour and switched drivers before finally finding it. What was nice about our hostel is that it was located right in the middle of the city and there was a 24 hour underground parking not too far away.
After checking in to our hostel we head out into the city. We were amused with various street entertainments. There was music, musicians, and dancing. There was this one guy on the street who had rigged this costume to look like a man and a woman dancing. It was amazing. His feet were the man dancers actual feet and he bent over and his hands went in the woman’s boots to look like her feet. Very confusing I’m assuming. I’ll attach a picture below so maybe you will understand what I’m talking about. After each song people gave him money. He drew quite a crowd. Dan and I were trying to figure out how much money he made each show. I think he probably did a dance every 10 or 15 min. We thought that after the show we watched at least 10-15 people put money in his bucket. We assumed that they put in at least one or two Euros. We estimated he makes at least 25 Euros a show every 15 minutes. Exhausting, but not bad money…I am currently making plans to learn how to do this to get some extra money on the weekends.
All over Seville there are people trying to get you to give them money. There are these crazy gypse ladies who shove this leaf thing into your hand and start reading your palm. After this they ask for a ton of money otherwise they will put bad curses on you and scream in your face. I almost got sucked into it, but Mireille saved me, Dan was not so fortunate…hah. We have proof below.
We were also confronted by a man playing the baritone at our dinner and asking for money, statue men, and a lady attempting to sing “La Bomba” at breakfast.

While walking through the city we saw some interesting things. There was this huge youth festival but we didn’t know why. Near one of the buildings there was a large group of emo/goth teenagers. I honestly thought some of them looked like they were straight out of the Michael Jackson Thriller music video. Many of them were dancing together to a few choreographed songs. We were so confused, still not quite sure what it was for, but definitely entertaining. After walking around for a while we stopped to get lunch. I split chicken paella (a common Spanish dish with rice, spices, and vegetables).

After lunch we walked to a Spanish castle, went in and walked around…took some pictures. When I say took some pictures, I mean ten, maybe. When Dawn says took some pictures, she took about 50. Throughout our two day trip to Seville she took over 150 pictures, ridiculous…but funny.

Later in the afternoon we were exhausted from traveling and walking around. We sat in the sun and had some café con leche (coffee). Later in the afternoon I wasn’t feeling kind of dizzy – maybe from the food or coffee. We went back to the hostel, relaxed and I took a quick nap. After the nap I started feeling better and we went out for dinner. We decided that we would create our own tapas restaurant crawl. At the first place we stopped at we ordered three tapas: a tomato basil bread thing, a cheese bread tapa, and one with onions and vegetables. The second place we went to we ordered potatoes and hot sauce, mushrooms and croquettes. I am not a big fan of croquettes, but Brittany likes them. They are kind of like deep fried bread ham and cheese…actually what am I talking about, I have no idea what is in them. Our third place we stopped at we just ordered some drinks. But the coolest thing as the last place was the live flamenco music and dancer. It was awesome, one of my favorite parts of the trip so far! They are so angry when singing flamenco music, it’s kind of scary. But the dancer was fabulous.

After the show we went back to the hostel to crash. In the morning we woke up early and went to mass at the massive – MASSIVE catholic cathedral. It was really interesting seeing guards at the church service. It was all in Spanish so I’m not quite sure what it was all about but I could pick up on a few words and sentences. After mass we got breakfast outside, I was so hungry and scrambled eggs, toast, bacon, fresh orange juice, and coffee tasted amazing.
We wanted to go into the rest of the cathedral, but it was closed until 2:30. If we left Seville that late we wouldn’t get home until dinner and a lot of us had lessons to prepare for Monday. It would have been really cool though, because apparently one of Christopher Columbus’s tombs is located at the cathedral. Instead we went to a flamenco museum with pictures and looked at the gift shop.

After stopping at STARBUCKS (we had to) for a coffee and sandwich…I feel like I’m drinking a lot of coffee…we headed home. We didn’t have as good of luck getting back as we did traveling to Seville. A two and a half hour trip turned into four. I was in the very back of the car with all the bags so I just attempted to stretch my legs over the bags and sleep to pass the time and avoid car sickness. It worked pretty well.
When we finally got home it was time to plan for some lessons and then go to bed. Seville was so much fun, one of my favorite parts of the trip so far. I am excited for our possible trips to Morocco and Madrid! =]

Journal Entry #15 - Pirate Day

Friday November 21, 2008

Today was pirate day at SIS for years 2-6. The years 6 students organized the entire event. The purpose was to raise money for one of the three orphanages that the school supports. All of the students who wanted to participate (which was everyone) needed to bring five Euros. All the students dressed up as pirates and participated in games to win “sweets” (candy). One of the girls in Ms. Bell’s class was so funny. She has a really big lisp and I smile every time she talked to me about winning more “shweetss” =]. Some of the games included: bobbing for apples (don’t want to know what kind of germs were in that bucket), walk the plank, sword fighting (would not fly in the US), face painting, dodge ball, scavenger hunt, and pirate gambling with chocolate gold coins (again probably would not be approved back home). Basically it was equivalent to an elementary carnival back home. Why pirates right? I know, same question I had. For a couple of weeks I had been hearing about this pirate day coming up and I could not figure out why the kids would be dressing up as pirates! Apparently it was a connection with our POI unit – conflict. Also, the students have been studying the current Somalia pirate conflict http://www.worldpoliticsreview.com/article.aspx?id=2744 This is a good site that explains the current issue.
All of the students running around dressed as miniature pirates was quite a site. One of the teachers came up to me and told me they say my observer (Dan) taking pictures and looking shocked at the chaos on campus, hahah! Some of the students had very elaborate outfits! Most parents either spent a lot of money buying costumes or they made them at home.
Overalll, the morning was a bit chaotic, but I was very impressed with the year six students who basically organized the entire event with a little assistance. They made posters, created games, had materials, props and prizes. This was the second annual SIS Pirate Day, it continues to be very successful and raise a lot of money for the orphanage. Today I only taught maths. I introduced how to reduce fractions in their simplest form. I am a little hesitant about teaching math lessons and whether I am going about it in the best way. The lack of resources remains a challenge of mine. If I had been teaching at this school for a couple of years, not having a textbook would not be an issue because I would have materials from previous years – but obviously as a student teacher I don’t have the much.

I started the lesson by stating our final objective, simplifying fractions. We worked through a few examples together and I wrote the steps that we used on the board to help those that needed a reminder.
1) Find factors of the numerator and denominator
2) Identify the Greatest Common Factor
3) Divide the numerator and denominator by the GCF.
To assist students who would have a lot of trouble with this we completed a factor spider worksheet to practice the first step of simplifying. The sheet had spiders on the page with a number written in the center of the spider – 16 for example. On the legs of the spider the students needed to write the factors 2,4,8,16. The students who finished this quickly went on to simplifying actual fractions. Next week for the “gifted and talented” students I will create a challenge worksheet.

In the afternoon I was lucky enough to observe Dawn teach a lesson. Gustavus encourages us to make time to observe other student teachers and I was excited to watch Dawn. Even more excited when I heard that she would be teaching human anatomy/sex ed. Go Dawn! =]. She did a great job.

AFTER SCHOOL
After school the five of us, and Dan had a twenty minute Skype conversation with our seminar class back home. It was fun to hear Johns voice and pick up a few other familiar voices. They asked us about our experience so far and if any of us, after working at SIS would consider international education. All of us gave a positive response.

From here we went straight to paddle with Dan and the rest of the usual Friday crowd. I didn’t get to see much of Dan on the paddle court. He was a playing a few courts away from me, but from what I heard he had a good time.

After paddle, Kevin dropped us back at our house in the mini bus and gave us time to change and take a shower. Then he picked us up an hour later and we met some staff for dinner at an Indian restaurant in Duquesa. Duquesa is a small town in between Sotogrande and Estapona. There were about twelve of us at dinner: Kevin his wife Lisa, who also teaches at the school, two science teachers (Lee and Zoe), Sam, Mireille, and the six of us. The food was amazing; I had chicken tika masalla and a few other appetizer type things. It was nice for Dan to be able to spend some more time with the staff that has been so helpful to us.

Again, another crazy day…the weekend will be even more crazy – tomorrow we leave for SEVILLA!

Journal Entry #14

Thursday November 20, 2008
Today I continued math lesson and taught the students how to change mixed numbers back into improper fractions. I was so excited because I felt like everyone understood the concept! Even the student who never turns in his work and is always one step behind finished 15 of the 20 problems answering them all correctly.

This afternoon was a big two hour POI lesson that I planned on propaganda. Dan came to observe during this time. I was given the central idea that there are “different representations of the truth.” I was to incorporate this idea with our inquiry unit on conflict. I decided that I would talk about propaganda/advertising and persuasion. As an introduction to the lesson I showed an Ellen clip that I found on YouTube. Here is the link if you are interested in watching it. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gPruPDhXas4. It was pretty funny and showed some ridiculous infomercial products. I transitioned from this video into my lesson by saying. “I know some of these products were pretty silly, but the sad thing is that some of these products sell, what strategies do the companies use to persuade people to buy them?” We talked about how the commercials make it seem like you need the product, or the product makes your life easier, or there will be a reward or price cut if you order soon. Our next activity included looking at advertisements that I created. I wanted specific examples of propaganda techniques and these were very hard to find on the internet so I created my own. The students looked at about fifteen ads and had to try and match the picture with a specific technique without going over the definitions. This was my attempt to create a lesson of inquiry. The students had to explore the photos and come up with the correct technique using common and prior knowledge. I did not stand at the front of the classroom, show them a picture and give them the definition. My goal was to create a more student-centered lesson instead of teacher-centered.

Some of my pictures had facts and figures to persuade the audience – an ipod with a caption that said, “Last year, 27 million ipods were sold in the US alone.” I found some humorous ads that caught my eye; such as a fat giraffe with the caption, “Proof a vegetarian diet is bad for you.” I found a picture of a Cheerios box that said, “Cheerios May Reduce Your Cholesterol!” This strategy reveals a hidden fear. I had a picture of converse tennis shoes and added the caption, “just your every day shoe…” to appeal to the plain folk. You get the idea.

The kids had a lot of fun looking at the ads and working with their table mates trying to figure out which picture fit with a specific technique. After they had time to work individually we went over the pictures and strategies as a whole class. This activity took up the first hour of the lesson.

For the second hour of the lesson I transitioned into looking at WWII propaganda posters. I found a really good website that had war posters from six different countries Germany, Russia, England, Japan, Italy, and the US. We looked at the war posters together on a PPT and the students tried to identify different propaganda techniques that the artist was using during the specific time of “conflict,” WWII. I also emphasized that the posters from the different countries displayed different “representations of the truth.” The students came to the conclusion that the messages on the posters from the six countries were very different. They also noted that posters seen in Germany, Japan, and Italy (Axes) would definitely not be seen in England of the US (Allies).

After the PPT I asked the students to create their own propaganda posters using a strategy that we talked about in the lesson. I am interested to see how the posters turn out. Maybe I will be able to take a picture of some of the student’s posters and post them on a future blog entry.

Dan thought the lesson went really well and back at home we had a good conversation about strengths and areas of improvement.

After a long day of teaching I went to the PE building and changed for football practice. I think I have permanently gotten sucked in to helping Mireille with her once a week club team. I was a lot of fun today though because the kids were working on passing in a square formation and following their pass and I ran around all of the groups and made sure they were still moving their feet. I don’t understand much about football (soccer) but I do understand the importance of moving your feet. The student would pass the ball and then stand there flat footed. I got all 5 groups to continuously be moving their feet throughout the drill and would whistle at them across the pitch if I saw they had stopped hahah, in no time they will be doing push ups for me too =]. Ha, Mireille loved it, she said that they never work that hard for her and that she’s not letting me leave Spain.

After football practice I got a ride back home with Sam and Mireille and I started cooking dinner. I said on Wednesday night that I would cook dinner for the entire house including Dan, yikes this could be dangerous. BUT…actually I thought it turned out pretty good considering there is not a nearby market to get needed ingredients, I am using a Spanish kitchen, pans that look like they are from WWI, a Celsius oven, and translating cooking directions from Spanish to English. I made curry chicken, with curry rice, and mixed vegetables. Dan provided the desert, Hagen Dais from the Carrefour. After an extremely long day, I lesson planned for Friday and went to bed.

Journal Entry #13

Wednesday November 19, 2008

So I got a little behind on blogs since I have been teaching more at the school. I’ll make these two blogs shorter so that I can get caught up with more present and exciting news. Wednesday at school I taught a maths lesson on how to change improper fractions into mixed numbers. Again, I find the lessons difficult here to plan because there is no text or curriculum. However, I thought the lesson went fairly well. Ms. Lisa had some suggestions as to how to keep the lesson moving and how to work with the wide variety of abilities in our class. I would say there is at least a three grade range difference between our twenty-three students. The gap making teaching one math concept to all the students difficult. I have to make sure the lowest ability level students are not lost while still challenging the gifted and talented group.

Dan arrived yesterday afternoon and it has been fun showing him around. The weather has been pretty unpredictable. It rained pretty hard this afternoon, but was really nice before and after the rain.

Tueaday Recycling Plant - Journal Entry #12

Today I went on a field trip with the two year three classes. Ms. Bell, one of the year three teachers invited me on the trip as an additional chaperone. She thought it might be nice to see a different age group of students at SIS and what they were studying.

In the morning we left for the recycling plant in Casares. Casares is an old Spanish town in the mountains right above Esapona. Unfortunately our bus driver thought that we needed to go up the mountain, but the recycling plant was at the bottom of the mountain. Oh well, nobody got car sick and there were some beautiful views! Casares is one of the most beautiful white villages. Ms. Bell was telling me that in the summer time there is a restaurant that you can go to and watch the sun set over the white village on the mountain. Most of the houses have blue shutters and when they pull them over the windows there is a beautiful blue glow over the town. I would love to see this, however I guess it is not open at night. Maybe sometime we will drive up there during the day for a relaxing coffee. I don’t think I will be trying the food, because Ms. Bell said their specialty and her favorite dish is the “black pudding” (pork blood) – I’ll pass thank you.
The year three students have been studying recycling as part of their inquiry on “our impact on the earth.” They have been learning about the importance of recycling and how to recycle.

When we got to the plant, there were three glass models of the area. The models showed how the plant has changed over the years. Basically they have made additions to that it does not smell so bad. For example, they put a cover over the compost pile and the drainage pools. They also installed some massive air freshener, they called it, that emits a pine sent before releasing the air back out into the atmosphere. The tour guide was a young woman, who I thought did a very good job with the presentation; however it was all in Spanish! Ms. Charlotte, the other year four teachers translated, but it was fun trying to translate the Spanish before Ms. Charlotte explained it in English. It was interesting to hear the Spanish terms as well as the British terms used. For example, I heard a lot of “reciclar” (to recycle), “reducer” (to reduce), and “basura” (trash). Then translated in English I heard “rubbish” (trash) and the “bin” (garbage can). How confusing to have to translate my own language! =]

After explaining the glass models of the factory we moved into another room with chairs and we watched a movie that showed the different parts of the factory including the large tunnels that separate the trash, the compressor, and the giant claw or “pulpa” in Spanish which translated means octopus.

At this particular plant only organic material is recycled by placing it in a giant compost pile. The other materials like “aluMINIum” as they say, glass, and cardboards are shipped to another area. The materials that we have not figured out how to recycle yet are carefully placed in a mountain they are creating. They put layers of thick plastic to protect the soil and trap all of the liquids then a layer of trash, followed by a layer of dirt then another layer of trash. Eventually they will have a mountain of trash basically but they plan to cover it with grass and landscape so it looks nice.

After the video, the tour guide showed multiple examples of toys or household products that you could make out of recycled materials. Some examples were pencil holders, bowling pins, kids catching mitts/scoops, toy cars, show boots etc. Then she picked a student from the audience to go through a bin of trash and she had to appropriately sort the material into the six colored bins. Glass went into the “verde” (green) bin, paper in the “azul” (blue bin), plastics and aluminum in the “Amarillo” (yellow) bin, clothes in the “rojo” (red bin), rubbish in the “negro” (black bin), appliances in the “punto limpio blanko” (special white bin) and _______________________________.

Next she talked about the large percentage of your trash that can be reduced if you recycle. I thought that the tour was very well done and interactive. At the end she handed out some goodie bags. In the bags were extra bags that could be reused for shopping or whatever instead of the plastic bags. There was an apron, bag, and notebook all made of recycled materials.

To end the tour we went around on the bus and were able to see the different parts of the plant that we had learned about. It was funny when we passed the compressed cardboard area. One student said, “Hey look a Wheatabix box!” Wheatabix is a very popular cereal here. Back at the house we joke about it because there are commercials for it all over the television, but now we are all buying it at the market, its pretty good!

Before heading back to the school we stopped at a park to have lunch and let the students run around. After lunch I helped separate all of the garbage from the students’ lunches so that it could be properly recycled – gross job.
On the way back the students were singing a song in Spanish. It is very similar to the song we have back home, “Who stole the cookie from the cookie jar?” I understood the whole thing except for one word. I later found out it was the reflexive verb for peeing oneself, great. So this is how the song went translated in English.

“Who peed themselves if their sleeping bag?” - Group
“Georgia peed herself in her sleeping bag?” - Group
“Who me?” – Georgia
“Yes you?” – Group
“Couldn’t be!” – Georgia
“Then who?” – Group

Spanish:
“Quien __________ en el saco de dormi?”


Awesome, haha…but got really annoying after 20 minutes of it.