Unespected news

As a teacher there are many reasons to be happy but there are also many ones to be sad.

Yesterday, in the 6th grade group I noticed there was a boy who wasn't there before. Is this your first class with me? I asked. Yes, he claimed. And we continue the class.

During the recess, the teacher told me that this handsome boy was during three months in a reabilitation center.

I share this because I was surprised.

Partner Professional Dialogue

Now, that I have done the activity related with the Professional dialogue, I am inclined to believe that partner professional dialogue is a crucial stage in the teaching-learning process. It is similar to peer coaching, which might help teachers to reflect and find out how they are doing with their teaching. In this case the Professional dialogue might occur between English Language Teachers in one or more than one conversations.

During the development of this activity we as teachers need to reflect on our teaching practice, it is related with the context in where we are teaching. I conclude that most of the teachers could benefit from becoming reflective teachers and having professional dialogues with partners.

For instance when I had the first dialogue with my colleague Miss Diva, she tried to situate in my entire context despite she does not teach children. I explained the goals of the course and how I was expecting to achieve them. It took time to talk about details; what was happening in the classroom, the development of the classes and students’ behavior. Indeed all this was necessary for the reflection on action process.

One advantage of choosing Miss Diva to have the dialogue was that she is my very close neighbor, so for the second (some hours) conversation she had reflected in my teaching practice and she was ready to comment some strategies. Even I needed to make changes in my planning.

My colleague was present in one of my classes as an observer, I remember we have seen this in other subject, the teacher observing, I liked and I consider as I mention above: most of the teachers might benefit with this practice. Although we can feel uncomfortable to have an observer and most to be criticize but the sole aim of this is to help us in our performance.

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“The only source of knowledge is experience:”

 Albert Einstein

Learning involves participation in a community of practice. I agree with this sentence because we can learn a lot from the books but …there’s with the practice when we really know what we know.

Relating with the social learning theory which posits: “that people learn from observing other people”, in Spanish we have a very famous sentence: “al lugar que fueres haz lo que vieres.” Or either way with observation we can see what happens with this or that action. It helps us to know something from the acting of others.

We never finished learning. We start learning from our mom when we are infants and we continue learning throughout our lives. Sometimes the learning gets from a hard experience or as a result of a difficult action.

Another famous phrase in Spanish: “la práctica hace al maestro.” The teachers might count from their teaching with the experience of what to do or how to work in different situations. Teachers must keep in their journal of “teaching practice” the most important events of their dairy routine.

“Initially people have to join communities and learn at the periphery.” I totally agree with this statement, and I consider it is the way it should be, because we need to see where we are getting in and then get in.

"Legitimate peripheral participation" provides a way to speak about the relations between newcomers and old-timers, and about activities, identities, and communities of knowledge and practice. I relate this with a person when is training to somebody else who will take his/her place.

Learning is in the conditions that bring people together and organize a point of contact that allows for particular pieces of information to take on relevance; without the points of contact, without the system of relevancies, there is not learning, and there is little memory. Learning does not belong to individual persons, but to the various conversations of which they are a part. We all are part of a society and we give and receive during the process of living which is process of learning.

Gardner (1999: 24) puts it, 'intelligence is better thought of as "distributed" in the world rather than "in the head"'.

Subject Pronouns

I'm happy to share this activity: subjects pronouns.
When I presented each of the pronouns helping me
 with the poster pasted on the board, I could feel
satisfied of my draws. Children from the three
different groups perfectly got them.
We were reviewing all of them and the results were
 positive. Next wil be the verb "to be".
                                                                                      

 A HUGE MISTAKE MADE

I has made a mistake with my 4th grade students!.

I was planning to present the months of the year and when I found the words in the internet with nice draws and colors, I decided to use them for my three groups.

I printed the squares as big enough for students to see them and I was ready.

The first group was 4th grade and my surprise was when students couldn't read italic. 

Students from the others groups didn't have any problem at all.

Everyday we learn and with these experiences shared we can get better teachers.

Things are happening!

I 'd like to share what happened today in my 6th grade class.

Because this school does not have enough teachers, children from 2nd grade work in the 6th grade classroom, they share teacher and classroom.

Last semester I worked with these 2nd grade children for my thesis, I taught them during the whole semester and now I'm not teaching them.

Every day when I get to the class, Teacher take the 2nd grade children out of the classroom to work in different place while I'm teaching but yesterday they stayed there because the 6th grade students were going to copy the days of the week from the blackboard. The class was going to be short of time.

What happened made me feel so happy!

Three of the 2nd grade Ss were getting ready to copy the words. And they did, when the Ss of 6th grade asked  me to check over their jobs, the small children were there with their perfect work done.

 







 A shared lesson plan

Objective: Ss will learn the alphabet’s pronunciation.                  And Ss will know how to spell their names and last names.
Grade: 4th, 5th and 6th grades                                                        Level: A1
Time	who	materials	activity	comments
5 min	T-Ss	n/a	Warm-up	T will talk about any topic. Greetings, weekend or weather.
10 min	T-Ss	Flash card	To present the alphabet. Letter by letter.	Adding the alphabet’ song
5 min	Ss	Notebooks and a pen or pencil	Ss will copy the alphabet on their notebooks	T will write around, giving support and answering doubts.
15 min	T-Ss-T	Wb, markers and eraser	Spelling names	When T spells a name Ss will write it. Ss will spell their name and T will write it on the wb. Each at a time.
5 min	T	Notebooks and a pen	T will sign the alphabet on Ss notebooks	T will  make the corrections needed if the alphabet has some mistakes
5 min	T-Ss	n/a	Feedback and homework	T will tell Ss the homework.

This is the lesson plan I used with the three groups. I'd like to share with you what have happened.

In sixth grade; the students worked really fast and I had to add another activity. They even spelled their last names.

In fifth grade, the lesson plan worked perfect; with time, and activities.

In fourth grade, the spelling names' activity didn't work at the first try, either at the second try, until the third one.

I already made my action plan but I'm sure it will be working at "different speed" in eacg group.

See you next time.