My last few weeks at CVIS

My last few weeks at CVIS were filled with lots of teaching and reflection. Here are some of the major highlights:

• Making learning culturally relevant to my students. This bimester the 6^th graders were studying immigration and migration. When my mom spoke with the class during the book donation the 6^th graders had an amazing conversation about their experience with language and culture. It made me realize that my students have many experiences with immigration and migration, especially living in a community like Sayulita and attending an international school. The conversation inspired me to draw on their own experiences during geography, as opposed to just reading about other people's experiences out of a book. I planned a series of lessons in which students investigated immigration and migration by conducting interviews among themselves and other people in the community. My students were so curious about certain aspects of immigration and migration after the interviews that I taught a lesson in language arts where they explored the different tourist processes for Mexicans and Americans. The character driven seminar was a success. I was so impressed with how passionate and in character my students were. As a follow up we even had a guest speaker, one of the administrators who was recently denied a tourist visa to the U.S. Kathy really helped me throughout this unit. She had amazing ideas and constructive criticism. Now, I am thinking about how I can incorporate language objectives into all of my lessons, and how I could expand on this unit in the future. 

Some statistics from the students interviews.

They interviewed friends, family, teachers, and 

even each other!

• Teaching English as a Second Language (ESL). Everyday there is a second language period, where students go either to Spanish as a Second Language or English as a Second Language. The students in Jen’s ESL class are all very advanced at speaking and listening. Because of this, she uses ESL to develop their reading and writing skills. Together, we put together a short writing unit. We used one of David Wiesner’s picture books. There is no text, so the plan was to have students read the pictures and author the text on their own. I thought it was going to be a great writing activity and that the students would love it. But I was wrong. My students really hated the activity. After writing the book, they were impressed with their final product but did not want to do it again with another book. I held a discussion with them about the activity. Basically, what I took from it was that they do not enjoy writing. They also dislike the writing process, which was a central focus of the unit. But, most importantly they didn’t seem to connect with the book. As a follow up, Jen and I started giving students time to engage in free-writes, where they can write about whatever they want without feeling pressure to write everything 100% correctly. While I want to eventually focus on the writing process, I also want them to develop a love for writing and I think free-writes will help them with that. For more formal writing activities in the future I would like to give students more power when deciding what to write about. One idea Kathy had that might work is taking pictures of a field trip, or some common experience for all of the students. Then, they could author the story.

The students loved the final product of "Tuesday"

but did not like the process it took to create the text.

After we finished the activity, students talked about

what they liked and didn't like about the activity

and how it could be imrpoved in the future. This discussion

was really helpful for me as a teacher.

•  Impromptu substituting. On my last Monday at CVIS Jen was out sick and I got to sub for the whole day! At first I was a little freaked out because I didn’t have anything planned for the day. But, I knew what the students are learning about and Jen sent me an overview for the day. There was a lot of scrambling in the morning, but it was a great experience for me. It showed me that I can control a classroom on my own and gave me a lot of confidence as a teacher. I mean, there are obviously things I can improve, but I can do it!
• CVIS Student Survey.  Our last “extra” project the four of us did for the school was creating and administering a student survey. We spoke with the teachers and administrators, developed questions, and took feedback. Then, we actually administered the survey. For K-3 we administered the survey one-on-one with students using a Google Form. With the older grades we just gave them a paper survey and then input the data ourselves. Google Forms was a great way to collect the data because it organizes all of the results for you. I hope the results are helpful to teachers!

Inputting student responses using Google Forms.