Tuesday Nov 11 - Entry #7

Today I continued teaching division in math class. We worked on long division and I also made some word problems with pictures. Hopefully the visual learners will benefit from the pictures. It is somewhat difficult for me to plan math lessons because I do not have a curriculum or textbook to follow, but the flexibility is nice. Tomorrow hopefully I will help them change a remainder into a decimal.

In language Ms. Lisa put up a piece of persuasive writing by Winston Churchill. It was a speech convincing his people to join the war. The students were asked to highlight certain parts of the speech. What parts of the piece made it persuasive? How do you build up points to make your argument persuasive? Ms. Lisa explained a format called the skeleton framework, they are going to use this format to help them create persuasive writing and eventually in their debates at the end of their period of inquiry.

In the afternoon Ms. Lisa allowed me to observe in a P3 classroom with Ms. Clare. Ms. Clare is a vey good teacher with a lot of IB experience. P3 is the same as second grade back home, so it was fun to compare their social and intellectual levels with my class at Cleveland. In their afternoon lessons they were just at the beginning stages of their newest points of inquiry, our place in time. Their central idea is time is a unique resource. I talked with Ms. Clare about this idea and we agreed that time is a very abstract concept. The best way to understand time is to break down the idea. They were working on the question, what is time? The students were looking at different forms of time: measured, your time, and earth time. They were asked to make posters for each type of time with associated vocabulary and pictures. For example measured time would be hours, minutes, seconds, watches, and clocks. An example of your time would be playtime, school time, nap time, football time, and earth time would be calendar type vocabulary such as days of the week and months of the year.

After this activity Ms. Clare explained that as a homework project the students will be creating timelines of their life. As a class the year 3 students would be creating a giant timeline of the earth. The students needed to think of times in history and then draw pictures of them. Ms. Clare and the students would document the points in history that the students identified and fill in the missing information throughout the inquiry unit. It was interesting to see what points in history the students could identify, some common answers were: dinosaurs, pirates, Egyptian pyramids, cavemen, WWII and the attack on the world trade center. I thought that it was very interesting that one of the most popular answers was pirates, don’t know where this came from. I also thought it was great that they knew a little about the attack on the world trade center. However, when I asked the student about it, he did not know where it happened.
I was most impressed this afternoon with the students’ handwriting. Almost all students were writing in very clear cursive. I was also impressed with their ability to work in small groups. They were very interested in the assignment and could easily work independently in small groups staying focused, for the most part.

I also thought that Ms. Clare did a great job of allowing the students to guide the lesson, it was very student centered and almost all of the ideas and information was generated by the students. They discussed with their peers about the different forms of time and they talked with them about events in earth’s history. If the students did not know an answer or how to spell a word they are working on looking it up in a children’s dictionary and even using thesauruses. One of the students wanted to know the year the automobile and planes were invented. Ms. Clare said, “Ah, would you like to go up to the library and ask for help to see if she can point you in the right direction to find this information?” Another students wanted to know about a volcano eruption and she let him use Google on the classroom computer to find the information he wanted.

After school we skype chatted with Dan and some El Ed students! Then made our way to Estapona with Mireille to stay there for a couple nights! Bye for now.