1. What have been your newest and most meaningful personal areas of learning during the MADRID BILINGUAL COORDINATORS PROGRAM ABOUT LEADING RESEARCH BASED BILINGUAL PROGRAMS?
- How to include more reflection time every day (10 minutes every day to improve our teaching practice), - How to create an action plan and make my colleagues participate, - How to use centers for learning for the students to be involved in different types of activities, - Many ideas and resources to deal with SEN students (dyslexia and ADHD), - How important it is to have a Spanish and an English teacher that the students can refer to in the language of instruction, - Daily assembly (Star of the day) to improve students communicative skills, - Lots of websites to use with our students:
http://reading.ecb.org: they explain the different reading skills and then they ask you to complete a task, so you check that they have understood (summarizing, inferring, visualizing...)
2. What are some of your new areas of understanding as coordinators?
- mentor new teachers,
- attend professional development courses,
- identify an issue in my classroom, talk about it with colleagues and decide a course of action,
- implement lesson study with new approaches learnt recently,
- implement a new instructional strategy in the school,
- share a teacher research plan and implement it,
- improve help sessions to make them more accesible to the students
- more experimenting and reflecting,
- coach other teachers,
- collaborate and reflect together on collective work,
- engage in collective school-wide improvement, resources
- collaborate with the broader school community,
- share outside the school...
3. What have been your greatest "Aha" moments?
I have been writing all the interesting ideas, activities, websites, resources ... down in my i-Pad, so I am going to attach them in order for me to have an easy access to them in the future:
Classroom management techniques:
3 things I have learnt today
2 questions I have
1 thing I would like to try or implement / I'm going to increase my knowledge on
Go out to the hall until you are ready to join us
Raise your hands so I can give you a hint
Centers of learning: 1. Listening centre: listen to the story where he wild things are 2. Word station: Write and draw a zoo that you would like to open 3. Art centre: finish the animals puppets 4. Library centre: read books from the reading corner about our topic 5. Writing centre: write paragraphs about the topic (short descriptions)
Reading strategies:
- write some words, they have to write a story in groups with those words in the same order, then they can write the story individually to practice the vocabulary.
- before reading a story: give them an anticipation guide (written one) where they can try and guess what the story is about.
Families who come into school:
- Professional families who start in the school: 75.000 words when the students enter kindergarden (5 year olds) - Low socioeconomic families who start the school: less then 5.000 words when they enter kindergarden (5 year olds)
Idea: can we test the students to see how many words they know when they come in?
Reading techniques: - Echo- reading, partner reading, silent reading, reading in groups, reading in twos...
- Open mind: draw the main character of a story writing the words of the face parts, everyone has a different colour. At the end of the activity students have to write a little paragraph to describe the character. They can stick them out on their pictures and
- Gallery walk: ask them to write something and then put it up on the wall so everybody can read it
- "I used to .... But now I ..." (Activity walking around the classroom, when the teacher stops, get together with a partner and say the sentence, then keep walking to do it over again). Then, they write what they all say and own and finally their own sentences.
- thumbs activity: ask questions and make the students put their thumbs up or down, if the answer is true or false.
- exit slip/exit tickets: piece of paper at the end of the lesson where you check what the students have understood (you can ask them questions about the most important things of the lesson).
- If the assistants want to have a snack at break time, they have to be on yard one day a week.
- mobile phone is forbidden, 3 times a year they can swap days around.
SEN activities to cover all types of abilities:
- ask the students to work about the same content in different ways (presentations, drawing, writing, role playing...): nought a and crosses so they do all the different types of activities and not just the drawing.
- provide different activities such as: do something about speaking (lecture, class discussion,Q-A, oral reading, verbal description...), illustrate (picture or graphic, whiteboards with markers, video captions...), demonstrate (think aloud, model or act out, build or construct, manipulate...), media (video, or film, audio, computer, TV, tactile materials...).
Dyslexia:
- Dragon program for free for dyslexia children (voice recognition): headset and microphone to use it - On- screen keyboard (use the mouse with your face: face movements recognition) - Natural reader: highlight and make the computer read (for dyslexia students) - Livescribe pen: it records the voice of the teacher when you take notes - Vgo robot: to be in the classroom from your own home, for specific disabilities. 5000$
ADHD:
- Velcro sticks to use while they are listening to the teacher - Stretchy string to feel under the table. - communication device to help students with - sticky ball to stretch and touch as well - page fluffer: to pass the pages in a books and to point out words - Popsicle sticks to separate pages as well - pocket chart to keep all the cards for children who need visual input (pocket charts, folder with separate parts, binder with different plastic folders...) - paper clips or big magnet clips to add Velcro with instructions or pictures to support reading - clothes peg to clip pencil so students can hold the pencils correctly (3 fingers in the pencil and the other two on the peg. - Popsicle stick to separate words, so they can all space words out when they struggle, so can draw a space man to make it funny.
4. Where do you see your personal focus for the remainder of the program?
I would like to work on my portfolio. I am very interested about finishing the action plan and working on it for a long time, so I can come up with lots of ideas that I could actually share and hopefully implement in my school.
I would also like to finish some other pages of my portfolio and help my colleagues to make their own portfolio back in Spain.