Past and future goals…

The end is almost here. And for me is always difficult and awful saying goodbye to those things I have loved. But it is time to move on. I barely remember exactly what were my goals at the beginning of the TKT’s course, but I’m pretty sure I have made a big progress.
It all began because I found this great job being a teacher in a kindergarten. At the beginning I was so nervous and lost, and that is why I decided to take this course in order to fit that job, as it should. All of a sudden, this course became in my first tool. And everything was marvelous and amazingly surprising when I was applying the new knowledge into my classroom.
Teaching became a challenging activity full with fun experiences, but also an activity that needed a lot of preparation, even in very young learners levels.
I must admit I was scare at the beginning of the course, thinking it was going to be too hard for me. It was hard, but it was completely enjoyable. Now I think, it was incredible, and I’m proud of myself of made it.
I’ve realized this is the first step to become a best teacher. The long road doesn’t seems so long now that I’ve taken the basic steps. In the near future, I will love to continuing preparing myself in the teaching area with a master degree for example. As all you know, my major allow me to move around in all of these area with a lot of benefits, such as working with discipline, managing groups, etc. I also think that this course gave me more fluency and property in the way I talk in English and think in English. Furthermore, If I’ll have the chance to improve my English in scientific contexts, I will do it right away.
As this post is looking like a goodbye letter, I will like to say to all of you are reading, that it was such an honor share these moments with you. And for my teacher Ellen, who I’m really thankful with, that this course was one of the most beautiful, helpful, useful and fun courses I’ve ever taken ☺

Keep in touch, and have fun with your future teaching life.

Love, Saraí.

Bloom’s taxonomy reflection

Surrounded by a bunch of theories (or should I say a thousand of theories?) about educational philosophy, we were encouraged to look at Bloom’s Taxonomy, which is an educational classification about learning objectives. I will not explain the whole theory, but I just like to remember the main ideas.
As a psychological classification, Bloom said that there are three main dimensions about learning objectives, which are emotional, psychomotor and cognitive. In the last one he describes 6 levels; knowledge, comprehension (lower levels), application, analysis (medium levels), synthesis and evaluation (higher levels). These 6 levels should be very important for English Language learners to develop critical thinking at all ages.
As a well-known model, there is in the web plenty of great exercises and examples to follow, in this example I will plan an EFL lesson for children from 4-6 years (my current students).

SEASONS
Spring
1. Knowledge: Listen to the recording “Spring is here” while you observe the spring pictures on the wall.

I see trees,
I see birds,
Butterflies too,
Flowers too,
Everything is growing,
everything is growing,
Spring is here”. (Modified from Colleen’s song “Spring is here”).

Cullen’s abc’s is a website created by this woman (I supposed) who tape her own videos singing excellent songs for pre-schoolers. The way she use her body language create and excellent atmosphere for children, and I’ve been using her songs for a long time and they work amazing. It is a fun way to interact with the children in a dynamic and familiar atmosphere.

2. Comprehension: Why do the flowers grow? Why is it hot? What do you see?
3. Application: Create your own spring drawing with watercolors.
4. Analysis: Look at the spring picture: what color are the trees? What is the boy wearing? How many flowers do you see?
5. Synthesis: Go out of the classroom and look at the flowers, the sun and the trees. Are they look like the ones in the pictures?
6. Evaluation: Let’s make a contest. Compare the spring picture on the wall, with your classmates’ drawings. Which is the most similar? Choose the one you like the most. The one you pick will be the winner of the day.

My learning philosophy…

So we already learning about learning styles and multiple intelligences (which I find very interesting) and we were encouraged to make our presentation about our learning philosophy.
I just want to say that this glog was made for having fun with all the colors, the vintage videos and the music. Although the assignments need to be professional, I think there is nothing wrong doing it original and funny so you can enjoy the learning process.
I hope you like it, it has a whole idea I’ve been working on this weekend 😀
My learning philosophy

Teamwork

Is there anything more exciting that going to school just for meeting new people? Well, I’m sure it is, but when I was a kid, I loved to go to school to meet new people. Although I remember that most of my primary teachers would like to send us teamwork as homework, and that we had to spend 4 or 5 hours each afternoon just to decide what to write in the bond. It was so boring.

Now I’ve learned, during my major and my TKT’S Preparation Course, which working in team are not only fun, but also stimulating. You have the chance to share your ideas, to develop your skills, and have a great benefit of it: learning.

While we were doing this task (The Glogster or PPT Project), I had no idea how to start communicating my other teammates. We didn’t know anything about anyone, and we only had our cel phones numbers. I thought time it was going to eat us while we were waiting how to contact ourselves. But finally, when we all know our strong abilities, and the decisions were made, I felt everything was going through the right way.

So for me, organization was the key word to finish this Project successfully. We all may have the same abilities, the willing to work and the intelligence to do it, but the main purpose in this projects (and others) can be the disposition to work and try to organize all the work together. Whenever the plan is in order, we can work more confident with each other.

Check out this beautiful Glog about TEAMWORK:

http://pikminmasta.glogster.com/TEAMWORK/

My first Glogster…

Yei…check it out…this is so much fun 😀

http://saritalennon.glogster.com/vintage1/

Graphic organizers for reading activities

So we all know that a graphic organizer can help us and our students to understand more easily a whole process, or any topic actually. So I’ve been searching in the web those graphic organizers, that can help us to use them in reading activities.

In this first one, we can make predictions about a story, in this case, it is a “Pre-reading” activity, before the intensive reading:

predictions

For the “During the reading” part, we can read a textbook and then use this form to organize the notes. In this case we need to turn the headlines of the text into a question (left column), and then answer that question on the right side of this page. It looks very organized:

qandanotetaking

And this third one, a simple storyboard form can be used to retell a story’s main events (Post- reading activity), plan before writing a story, plan for a film, etc. Check it out, it has beautiful images:

storyboard

Literature circles

In the beginning of that class, I sat down in a table, near to the others numbers 1, 2, and 4. Obviously, I was number 3, and I had read my part of the article, about Integrated Skills in the ESL/EFL Classroom, made notes and studied about it. So, pretty much, I was like the number 3 expert. After number 1 and 2, I shared my information in order, while other members of the group were making notes of what I was saying or measuring time. So we all had the chance to talk, listen and write notes. The Teacher asked us to discuss some activities to solve a specific problem, and then make a quick summary reflection of each group about what we had discussed. After I read the article called: Literature Circles, by Harvey Daniels, I’ve realized we just made one in class.

The main language skills are: reading, writing, listening and speaking, but in fact, literature circles can combine them all, that makes them into an integrated skill activity. The general literature circle process, its like this:

In this process, while the students are reading their specific part, have the chance to develop or practice the subkills of reading, such as coherence and cohesion, making sense to whole text, to understand and then to discuss it with their classmates. Some of others benefits are: you encourage your students to talk (specially in English), you give them a manner to make the knowledge by their own, and they have the opportunity to discuss, give their own opinion, and summarize or agree in a reflective sentence or conclusion.

Literature circles are a dynamic way to put your students at work. Put it in practice in your next reading activity, and let your students have fun learning.

Teaching new vocabulary

If learning a new word means knowing it’s meaning, it’s spelling and pronunciation, we have a lot to do learning new vocabulary. Imagine that your dad tell you to learn the word: Efficient. You have 10, and you already know how to write and read. You sit at your dinner table, and start to write the new word with it’s meaning for 100 times. It sounds fun isn’t it? Should learning be boring all the time? Of course not, but in what way can we helped our students to learn them? It will all depend on your creative mind.

One thing we need to know it’s the grade we are teaching, knowing the context of our students, in order to know what creative game, worksheet or activity could interest them the most. For example, for kindergarten students (my favorite students :D) we can play a game, by the end of the lesson about drawing the meaning of the new words. If you are teaching vegetables, it is easy to draw a carrot, a lettuce, an onion, or anything else. So the whole group could raise their hand and tell the right word. I call this game: Pictionary. It is fun to play, it is easy to plan, and they love to do it for competition. In this case, they repeat the pronunciation of the word, and learn the meaning. They won’t learn how to write it, but they don’t know how to read yet.

Now, let’s think about teenage students. Most of them have learnt the value of grades and numbers, and yes, they supposed to know how to read and write. So in this case, we can do an activity called: Dictation.
In the beginning of the lesson the Teacher will tell them the activity, which consists in dictate a word that have been seen in class, and ask for the meaning of the word they remember. They won’t be able to watch the word while the activity. In this case, they have to pay attention to the pronunciation of the teacher, and the spelling of the word in the whole class. And in the end, they could win a good grade if they know the words they have seen.

Do you have another ideas? Share them here, or tell me about your experience. And let’s have fun learning.

Lexis…

Unit 2, from the TKT’S Course:

To help you to learn the different meaning of words, we must study the vocabulary items, which are just summarized in this wordle (my first one):

Have a child, plant a tree and write a blog.

Isn’t that a great tip for life? Whenever I think about learn more about life I always hear my teachers’ voices saying this, only that instead of blog, everybody would say: book. Does that mean that technology is changing our way of thinking? It may happen, but for teachers and students, blogging could be another great resource for learning process and communication.

Blogging is a new way to be connected to a parallel world, besides the real one, called Internet. Because of its great characteristics such as innovation, design and originality, an online diary or journal has a great possibility to entrance young and old people. Is not only about letters and letters, but also about add images, photos, videos, audio files and more. A blog could be a personal place to get the world to meet you, a place to color your posts, talk about your likes and show your design skills.

Furthermore, a blog could bring benefits to teachers and students, equally. For those who teach in an alternative way, this resource could be another way to interact with your students by publishing comments and feedback directly to the blog, an easy way to share information on-line, like documents, videos, slides, etc.  Can also create a space for debating opinions and ideas, and in the end, it would create habits for writing and reading, something really hard to teach.

What about students? If we are talking about young students, they will be delighted to be on-line on their computers or laptops just to do homework, just because they spend too much time on them. And because of that, there will notice ride away that this is an easy way to deliver their work, without even leave the house. But of course, is not the only thing they are interested in, because blogging, besides everything, is a tool for communication, and there isn’t any student, or even person, who do not need communicate and express their words.

So what are you waiting for? Don’t you have any blog already? Give it a try; you may be amazed for the blogging art. I already know my goals for life: have a child, plant a tree and write a blog.