Wednesday Nov 12 - Entry #8

Wednesday November, 12, 2008

Today was our first production of the play! The year six students performed for the primary students in years 1-3. I was excited because Mireille, Annika, and Brittany were there to watch with me. Right away in the morning when I got to school, the students had to change into their costumes. This was a bit chaotic and some of the girls were giving me their watches to wear. “They didn’t wear watches in Victorian times, Ms. Rachael, will you hold this for me?” In the end I was wearing two watches on my left hand, one on my right and another in my pocket that wouldn’t fit on my wrist! =]

I was very pleased with the performance and thought the kids did a great job. It was about a 45 minute presentation, so I also thought the young students were a great audience. It was a long time for them to sit, and they were also on a hard tile floor. In addition, the content of the play was way over their heads, but I do think that they enjoyed the songs.

After the production I helped out with P1 primary for the first ten minutes while my students had their snacks and got changed back into their school uniforms. Last night I gave Mireille all of my elementary education songs that I downloaded on my computer during my last placement. I also told her about the Tooty Ta!!! She wanted me to come in and teach it to her P1 (kindergarten) class. I asked Brittany if she would come to PE with her kids so she could help me demonstrate. It has been a long time since I have worked with that young of kids, but it was fun. They all loved the Tooty Ta, and looked ridiculous while doing it. Mireille wants me to teach it to her so that she can use it again. If you don’t know what the Tooty Ta is, it’s a song and dance that we learned during methods classes at Gustavus. It is a serious of actions that eventually has the students standing with their: thumbs up, elbows in, feet apart, knees together, toes together, bottoms up, eyes shut, tongue out, and turning around. While in this crazy position we sing together “Tooty ta, tooty ta, tooty tat a.”

I taught during maths again today, and we continued to work on division. They are doing fairly well. Today we moved on from doing long division into changing the remainders in their answers to a decimal point. When I look at their practice problems at the end of the hour I record how many they were able to complete and how many they answered correctly. This gives me a good idea of where the students are at. Tomorrow I will need to prepare some extra problems who have division mastered. They need some challenge problems.

Since today was Wednesday it was their crazy activity day today. Ms. Lisa and I had some time to sit down and discuss her “tracking and monitoring” plan. It is very different from what I am used to. For example, for math there is a section for division. Within division there are specific areas are being monitored for example, can the students divide without remainders, with remainders, can they change a remainder to a decimal, can they relate division to story problems. For each of these questions I colored a red (not mastered) yellow (partially mastered) or green (completely mastered) dot.

During this time I also worked on putting up information from my lesson on origami cranes on a bulletin board. It’s going to be pretty elaborate so it has been taking me a while. I cut out pictures from the PowerPoint, added colored backgrounds and laminated them. I also shortened the story I told about Sadako so that I can tell the story through picture captions. Finally, I am going to attempt to string and hang the origami cranes that the students made. I will take a picture of the finished product and post it when I am finished.

After school the Primary Years Program had a staff meeting. The objective was to look at academic planners of other teachers and see if their central ideas and points of interest correlated. The planners that the teachers use are revised and reused throughout the years so it is important for the summative assessment to still match the central idea as well. We split up into small groups of three. I was assigned to work with Olive, a year five teacher and one of the nursery teachers. I found this meeting and discussion very helpful for understanding the IB planners and structure. It was flattering when the two teachers decided to take some of my suggestions about how to improve the planner we were working on.

The planner we were asked to look at was for a year 4 class. The central idea was: past civilizations leave us with a legacy which influences the way we live today. The lines of inquiry that the teachers planned to cover include: roman technology and infrastructure, roman settlements, and roman life and how it helped and developed our culture today. Our question was, why only the Romans? What about other past civilizations in Spain such as the Moors? We wondered if the questions of inquiry should reflect more than one civilization. Also within the summative assessment section of the planner, the students needed to present information about Roman soldiers and gladiators. We agreed that this was a good assessment of what they knew, however, I made a point that that does not connect back to the central idea in that how does it influence the way we live today. Possibly the students could have been asked to make a connection between soldiers in the past and soldiers today, this would have required a deeper level of processing and explaining this connection would also prove that they know information about the past and present.

We came to the conclusion that we liked the central idea. It is very broad with a lot of room for flexibility. However, when we studied the points/lines of inquiry and guided questions they were too specific relating only to the Romans. It gave the students no room to be inquisitive and explore other past civilizations. In conclusion, the planner was too teacher – centered, it was sent up in such a way where the teachers would just feed the students information. Instead, the focus of IB should really be student – centered where the individuals have the opportunity to let their curiosity and interests guide their learning.

I cannot explain how helpful this meeting was for me. First of all it helped me to understand the crazy format of the planner. It basically looks like this big grid with questions and interest points and assessment all over in random boxes. But now, I think it is a little more familiar. It also helped me to understand how teachers plan, and what they do with their students to meet the central ideas. Looking at a planner and “picking at it” would have been very helpful in IB training. It is very realistic and something that would have helped me a lot upon my arrival. Maybe I will make this suggestion of the training for the future.

Back to Estapona for the night with Annika, Brittany and Mireille…the week is just flying by!

ps. look Mom! I got a tatoo ;) just kidding.