Last Weekend In Espana

The last weekend was spent with Mireille and Brittany in Pona. We went out to a nice seafood restaurant, yes that's right - seafood. I had an amazing steak, but was proud to say that I tried shrimp, crab and some other mystery fish. It was actually pretty good.

We met up with some of the other teachers down at the port later that night for one last get together.

Sunday was a day to pack and clean the house. The cab gave us a little scare when it was 30 min late. Good thing we called and told it to come 30 earlier than the original time. Missing an international flight would be a very bad thing. It picked us up around 3:00AM. Most of us just stayed up the whole night so we could get some sleep on the plane.

Driving from Sotogrande to the airport in Malaga was one of the weirdest feelings. It was the definition of bittersweet. I was very excited to get back home to the states and see my friends and family etc. However I was so sad to leave, I almost felt sick to my stomach. I had never made so many connections with people I knew I may never see again -- the staff and students. In the past I had taken vacations over seas with my family, but you don't make connections. Or you may visit family away from home, but because they're family you know you will see them again sometime in the future. I could not say the same about the people at SIS.

Before when I thought about the location of Spain I said to myself, it’s not that far away...just across the ocean. Ha oh no, it may not seem that far, but with our flight schedule it was definitely a solid 24 hours of traveling. Sotogrande to Malaga, Malaga to NY (terrible airport), NY to Chicago and Chicago to Minneapolis…the cold air getting off the plane took my breath away, welcome home =]

Friday

Last day at SIS

This morning we started the day by finishing up our last two debates. They were even better than yesterday! One of the debates was about whether or not students should be allowed "mobiles" in school. They really got into it =].

For my final math lesson we played "the math game" and used a compass to create Christmas ornaments. The students cut out their designs and I put them thought the laminator...they turned out really well.

In the afternoon the students finished up some art and we had a short goodbye party. I passed out my lollipops and the students gave me a booklet of memories created by the students and a giant card.

I was pretty sad my last day. Some of the students were pretty upset too...there were a few tears =[

I am really going to miss the staff and students at the school, they really were amazing.

After school we went to paddle for our final Friday of play. It was raining so we didn't get a lot of playing in, but it was nice to spend a few final hours chatting with some of the staff in the clubhouse. We also got job offers from Chris Charleson to come back and work at SIS, sweet!

Thursday

Last night we saw the senior theater production "Fugee" short for refugee. I thought the students did a very good job. It was very intense and sent a strong message.

Today the students started their debates! I got some of the debates on tape and I hope to get a hold of the recording. The students needed to have an opening statement (mostly memorized) points of argument and then attempt to debate their opponents arguments. For the most part, I thought they did a wonderful job.

After school today Brittany and I stayed after and made some large signs/thank you cards for our students. I also drove Mireille's new rental car - a picante - to the Lidle market. We got some suckers "lollypops" for our students and I got Ms. Lisa some flowers and a card.
I cannot believe that tomorrow will be my last day...

The Final Crazy Wednesday

This morning the students had PE and Spanish. After these two lessons I taught a lesson on children in conflict. Instead of looking at evacuees and children during WWII, I talked about children that are currently in conflict: child soldiers. I found a website called “Invisible Children,” it was very interesting. Three college students from California traveled to Africa to find information about children in conflict. The created a documentary about child soldiers in Uganda. I was eager to learn more about the site and a program they started called the bracelet campaign. Bracelets made out of reed and recycled wire by the Uganda people are sold to the United States. The money goes children in families in need. I thought this might be a very cool project for the year six students next year during their unit of inquiry. They could see if they could actually order some of the bracelets. With each bracelet is a short film about the person that made it. The bracelets also symbolize different things. The symbolism of the bracelets combined with the conflict issue would fit perfectly with the POI conflict unit. I suggested this to Ms. Lisa. I might even see if I can get involved and see if I could get SEA to sponsor an event.

http://www.invisiblechildren.com/home.php

In the afternoon I taught a math lesson on circles and using a compass. The students created different size circles for their assignment by measuring a radius or diameter. I also asked them to create triangles within the circles and they needed to measure the angle with a protractor.

The next lesson was with my extended writing group. I really have enjoyed working with this group and teaching writing lessons, something I thought I’d never like. Today I asked the students to create a list on their mini whiteboards of words they like, and word they don’t like…not the meaning of the word, but how it sounds. I did a similar activity with Jill Potts and my education methods class last spring. On the SMART board I showed an example of what I wanted the students to do. Under words I like I had shenanigans, falafel, rubbish and kabob. I explained that these were all funny words and I like how they sound. Under words that I don’t like I had moist, spouse, and fork.

The students had a lot of fun creating lists of their own. The high level of excitement in the room about a writing activity was surprising. The students’ energy level made it fun and gave me confidence. As a class we created a big list on the whiteboard with all of our favorite and not so favorite words. I also told the students that they could write words in other languages, which was really neat. I think we had German, English, Danish, Spanish, and French. This is something you would not be able to do in the states.

After the writing activity I was supposed to teach my last intercultural lesson on Chefcharon, the Moroccan orphanage supported by SIS. Instead I joined with two other teachers and we made Holiday cards with a candle on the front. Mrs. Hartland explained that different cultures and religions do not all celebrate the same holiday at this time of year, but most of them have a symbol of light. She said this was her way of cheating by making Christmas cards, but still tying in the multi-cultural theme. The students were also encouraged to write Merry Christmas or Happy New Year in more than one language on their card.

In the past, Mrs. Harland was an art teacher, this was obvious today when she was explaining to the students how to make the card. It was hilarious, she was so clear, and seemed to be speaking to them as if they were idiots. But she swore that at least one of the students would do it wrong. Ms. Claire and I were rolling laughing. I wish I would have had it on tape.

“Ok now children this is how you are going to make your card. You are going to get one piece of tag board paper, now two…one.

Then you are going to fold it in half like a book, make sure your corners are together. You want your card with the binding on the left side like a book. See watch, I’m going to take my card, go sit down and read a book. First I need to open my book (she closes her eyes) I reach down and lift the corner up, see. Now I can open my book. If I had it with the binding on the right side I would sit down to open my book, try and lift up the corner and oop, oops (she pulls at the folded corner) look, it won’t open.

The next thing you are going to do is get a stencil of a candle. This is a s-t-e-n-c-i-l, you do not cut the stencil, you only trace it…so you shouldn’t have scissors anywhere near the stencil! (Claire and I start laughing)

So you are going to want to place the stencil on your card and press it down firmly with your fingers. She holds up her left hand, what do I do with this hand? (“You hold then stencil” – students) She hold up her right hand, what do I do with this hand? (“You trace the candle” – the students). Right, now see how firmly I’m pressing down so the stencil doesn’t move, my fingertips turn a little white. You might have to pick up your hand and move it so you can trace all the way around the candle but you should already have some marks drawn to help you line it up again if the stencil moves.

Ok no you are going to glue on the blue paper for the candle. Not green, not red. Because if you use green you will have red holly leaves or blue berries. The candle needs to be blue. (Claire turns to me, smiles and whispers, so much for creativity with this card) Next you can cut out the candle on the front flap of the card. And when you cut, I know your thinking – why does she need to talk to us about how to cut – but many students and some adults do not know how to cut properly. When you cut you turn the paper not the scissors. She pretends to cut out the card by turning the scissors and cutting toward her and twisting her arm into multiple uncomfortable positions to prove a point. See all you need to do is turn the paper. Watch, I’m cutting, I’m cutting and oop – look I’m at the and of the line, now I must turn the paper and continue cutting. I’m cutting, I’m cutting and oop, I’m at the end again, I must do what? Turn the paper.

Next you need some holly leaves, we will have stencils for this two and you need two leaves. You glue the leaves at the end of the candle. Then you need three berries, not two, not four. When you glue things they should be in odd numbers – it looks better. Then you have your card.

She explains that somebody will not have the card facing the right way; it will have the binding on the right. I thought, no way, no way…but sure enough one student had the binding on the wrong side and another student cut out both layers of the candle so there wasn’t a background to write a message on, perfect.
Despite the two mistakes most of the cards turned out really well, I even got to make one!

Final Blogs

I'm back in the states!

For those of you that have been loyal blog followers, thank you. I'm glad you have enjoyed my stories and pictures. As you may have noticed I had a difficult time keeping up with the blogs the last two weeks due to increased lesson planning and responsibility at school. However, I still want to publish some blogs about what I did during my final days in Spain. Tomorrow morning I am leaving early to go snowboarding for a few days in Colorado, but hopefully when I will return I will post the final blogs...so check again then...have a Merry Christmas

Tuesday - A day in Estepona

Today Brittany, Mireille and I went to Estepona. We enjoyed the nice weather, found another kabob place – we are kind of obsessed now – and did some gift shopping. The three of us have no fun together...as you can see from the pictures

MADRID

Just got back from our CRAZY trip to Madrid!

The adventure started out by leaving Estapona around 5:30 in the morning. We drove Mireille’s rented car one hour to the Malaga airport. When we got there, there was some confusion with where the train station was. Mireille talked to the rental car lady and she said that the train station was right by the airport, false! We ran around the airport parking lot and surrounding area looking for a train station. We found an abandoned train station close by, but it just didn’t seem right. It was dark, and nobody was there…just didn’t feel right. Finally we called Tim, who was dropping Danny off at the train station and asked him where it was. He said that we would need to take a cab to get to the train station. It was at least five minutes away from the airport by car…great, our train was set to leave at 7:10 and it was about 6:50.

We flagged down a taxi, however, we needed two taxi’s so we waited for what seemed like an hour for another taxi to come. Finally, the taxi driver just agreed to drive all of us in his car to the train station. We arrived at the train station at 7:00. As I raced out of the car, I started throwing bags from the trunk out onto the street as we ran, literally, into the train station. We found out our platform, but our tickets were just paper receipts…we needed to collect the actual ticket from a machine before getting through the gates. I’m sure it was quite a site, us running through an empty, dark, train station. Tim was standing in the lobby smiling and witnessing the madness. He said calmly, “uh your train is blinking red, salida imediamente.” As the tickets printed one by one through the machine, I grabbed one and Lee just told me to go. I started running through the gates. It was 7:08, and they had shut the gates. The train was still there…but we weren’t allowed to get on. Perfect. After talking with customer service they said that we could pay 20% and go on the 9 o’clock train, there were still a few openings. However, when we went to book out tickets, no openings showed up. We were now pushed back to the 11 o’clock train, and had to pay extra to travel business class. There was one perk to this, while waiting for the train we were allowed to stay in the Sala business class club where we had access to free juice/coffee and snacks. We played some cards, listened to music and read our travel books on Spain. The Sala club had a huge glass window that overlooked the platforms, and we found it entertaining to watch a man and his wife come late to the 9 o’clock train and try to convince the guards that they should be let on. Deshavu. We felt better knowing we weren’t the only ones who missed our train, horrible I know.

At 11:00 we were finally on the train headed for Madrid. We arrived two and a half hours later. At the train station we bought some metro passes and checked in to our hostal for the first night. It wasn’t in the greatest location, because we waited too late to book the rooms. We forgot that Monday was a Spanish holiday. But it wasn’t too bad because the metro station was only 6 blocks away.

We showered up at the hostal, but had to wait for Dawn to call. She had been traveling in Germany and was going to meet us in Madrid. I got a call from her, she was at the airport and crying. It was pretty scary, but apparently they had lost her luggage and she didn’t know how to find us. Brittany and Mireille walked back to the metro and took it to the airport to pick her up. Annika and I waited at the hostal, relaxed and listened to some music. Two hours later everyone returned, we had some snacks and then headed back out to the metro to go out for the night. Wearing heals was a bad idea.

Mireille, Annika, Brittany, Dawn and I met up with Lee and his friend Courtney in downtown Madrid. We hit up a couple of places for tapas and they were amazing!
Stayed up pretty late, enjoyed the night and then returned to the hostal. The next day we got up early and packed up. We took the metro downtown to try and find “El Rostro” (a market). It was pretty interesting. There was books, leggings, spices, jewelry, underwear, boots, corduroy pants, basically all your necessary daily items =]. Madrit was a little difficult to fully embrace due to the rain. There were people everywhere, but you couldn’t see them…all you could see was a sea of umbrellas. Have you ever tried to walk somewhere when there is a traffic jam not from people but from umbrellas, not a fan. After the market we walked around the town and then found some food. We stopped at a restaurant where I had patatas con salsa brava and scrambled eggs with ham. Our table was right next to the window to the main street where the menu for the restaurant was located. We were entertained by people watching – I mean people looking at us and our food, not us looking at them. After a while, I decided that I should start convincing the people on the street that the place we were at was a good restaurant and the food was delicious. This was accomplished by holding up a spoonful of my food, smiling at the people on the streets, giving thumbs up and then eating it. I got a few weird looks, but an old man with a grey umbrella laughed and found it pretty entertaining. Don’t judge, it was raining and we were bored. =]

After lunch Mireille, Brittany and I walked around the town and Dawn and Annika tried to find a church/museum to go in. Later that night we ate fast food kebobs and falafels, they were so good. Kebobs are Turkish and are sometimes called shawarmas. It is pita bread filled with chicken or pork, lettuce, tomato, and a dill and red sauce. If you go to Messads in the Mankato mall, you can get something similar…highly recommended.

When we got back to the hotel, we found out that Dawn and Annika were locked out of their room. This weekend just keeps getting better. Of course the little old lady that runs the hostel does not have a copy of the key. I honestly don’t know where she would even make a copy, the keys looked like they were from WWII. The only possible way to get in after she stripped the bolts on the door was to break it down. She was freaking out (in Spanish) because apparently she just did that last week to a different room and had to pay 300 Euros. Another way would be for someone to go from Lee’s balcony over the edge of a seven story ledge into the balcony of the locked room. So Lee decides to do it as we were all freaking out and telling him not to. He got to the other balcony safely and opened the room door. Mireille, Brittany and I played some cards and then went out again before going to bed to enjoy our final hours in Madrid before returning home.

We did NOT miss the train on the way home, we were a good 1.5 hours early…

Second to last week at Soto

Highlights from this week:
1. Running on the beach with Mireille Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday. It is one of the most amazing things to run at sunset along the beach. On a clear night we can see the Gibraltar, Africa, the moon and the stars...

2. Watching my year six students play in the lunch time football championship game. The Dustpan Cleaners took on the Beach Boys. They are amazing player. Some of them are more modest than others, I saw a few brushing off their shoulders and mock shinning each other's shoes. I couldn't help but laugh

3. Starting to teach my two dimensional shapes unit in math and having everyone understand everyone! I didn't have to split my class up into three ability groups, amazing. On Monday I introduced all of the common 2D shapes and they had to draw them in their notebooks. Tuesday I used a lesson that I had designed for my fifth grade class during methods on triangles. I talked about the importance of learning about triangles, what professions deal with triangles and where can we find triangles in the real world. We also identified different types of triangles. Yesterday I taped a 2D shape on the backs of all of the students and they had to go around the room asking yes or no questions about their shapes properties to figure out what shape they were. Today I introduced using a protractor and measuring angles, something I always found difficult. However, once again, all of the students were successful after taking notes on the "four easy steps" to identify an angle. =] Tomorrow we will have our second weekly "Math Game." As introduced by my fifth grade teacher, Mrs. Tolar at Bamber Valley Elementary school. The students bet money on whether they will answer math questions correctly and add or subtract money from their team's total.

4. Receiving the final drafts of my informal and formal letters, from all of the students - finally!

5. Teaching the loves and loathes lesson on Wednesday for the extended writing students. These were very entertaining! I also made friends with a year five student named Mario, he told me he loves American Football (first student I have found to say this) unfortunately, he told me he hates the Vikings haha. Now I keep rubbing it in his face that they are doing well. =]

6. Playing 40/40 or Kick the Can with my Intercultural group on Wednesday afternoon. I really enjoy getting to know some of the other primary students, they are all so great! I really am going to miss them, a lot...kind of dreading it.

7. Dancing with Brittany's P1 class during Mireille's PE class. I introduced them to the song "Hop Hop Stop" (From Cleveland - hello all) they loved it...and I have it on video tape.

8. Having Mireille teach me how to drive a 5 speed manual car, in Spain - yikes. I drove all the way from Marbella to Sotogrande after school today. I am now the MASTER of round - a - bouts, driving a manual in the states now will be a breeze. However, it was slightly embarrassing when I stalled at the toll booth, haha...I had a good recovery thought, it's alright. No worries Mom and Dad, I am still in one piece and Mireille is too ;)

9. Asking which one of my students was missing their jumper (aka sweatshirt) and having Alex tell me to give it to Vicky to smell it, and then she would know whose it was. She smelled it, I gagged, and she told me she thought it was Miguel's. HAHAHA

10. Saturday we travel to MADRID! yes

Saturday and Sunday

Saturday I continued to work on some homework and Brittany and I cleaned the house. Around 1 o’clock Mireille came to the house and picked up Dawn, Brittany and I. We made our way to the school to check out the Christmas bazaar. It was packed! There were a whole bunch of food stands and all of my year 6 students were trying to get me to buy their food. I ended up having a green chicken curry dish. It was really good, but very spicy! Student choirs were singing Christmas songs, Santa Claus was there, and in the gymnasium there were stands everywhere with crafts, jewelry and food. I didn’t end up buying anything because I was warned ahead of time that everything was overpriced. However, just like the Halloween party, the Christmas bazaar was a huge event, and the school once again had a very good turnout of students, teachers and parents. Way to go SIS.

After the bazzar we packed up our things at the house to get ready for the week in Estapona. In “Pona” we went to the Mercadona – a supermarket – and stocked up on food. I also needed new shampoo and other items etc. We were all surprised at how expensive Herbal Essences is here…=]

At night we were invited to Lee’s house (Dawn’s cooperating teacher) for dinner. He made spaghetti with Chicken and mushroom sauce. It was really nice not to have to cook or go out for dinner. After dinner we went out to the port. When returning to MN I think I will find a whole new respect for our smoking ban. At the end of the night every article of clothing reeks of smoke…gross.

Sunday was a day to relax, sleep, watch movies, and prepare for my week. I have been full time at SIS for a total of five days now, and I will be teaching full time again this whole week. I also finished another standard, yes…one left.

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