Update on the Language Barrier

First let me say she has come a long way. Her father told us she spoke very little English and didn't understand much more. She is progressing rapidly. It is truly amazing how the human mind works and how quickly children absorb information and can learn new things! I don't think I would be able to make such progress in such a short amount of time!

A side note, the two others in her class speak only English (no translators). Funny, as most of my students are bilingual and some are trilingual-it will be quite the advantage when they are grown!

My second class with her I discovered she knew the words yes and no. Oh the possibilities that opened up! I gained much insight into what she was able to understand. I also learned to phrase things in multiple ways. If I say it one way and it gets a blank stare, I say it a different way. I am by nature flexible and will do anything to help a child learn, so this isn't as difficult for me as it might be for some people. Sometimes just changing a few words does the trick and sometimes it takes 4-5 tries to get her to understand, but it is well worth it. Encouragement has been phenomenal with her. High fives, thumbs up and smiles are universal. And she loves them all :)

Today I was so proud of her!! She was able to trace her name without my help (we have been doing this hand over hand for a month with no independence gained until tonight). It looked very much like a three year old wrote it, but she is three, so this is putting her right at age level!!!

She was also able to match the entire uppercase alphabet by herself. We have a magnetic board with uppercase and lowercase letters and the students match them (uppercase to uppercase and lowercase to lowercase). This has been an ongoing process. It began with hand over hand modeling. Then it moved onto her being able to match (very slowly), one at a time, as long as I was right next to her. She would take one letter, hold it next to the a, see if it matched and move on down the alphabet. This was a long and grueling process, but it was progress. Tonight I was able to sit at my regular seat and she was able to match the whole alphabet independently by looking at the letter and finding it (not going through the entire alphabet). She got lots of smiles and high fives.

Another thing I began working with her on today was comprehension. The curriculum is worksheet based and begins by random words being read and pictures next to them. They have progressed now to the point where the pictures are more obscure. Like the words on one page today were fast, and it showed a rabbit with "speed marks", past and it showed the rabbit going past a turtle and last and it showed 4 white ducks and a yellow one, the yellow being last in the line. We talked about the pictures and I can tell she understands some. It will take a bit for her vocabulary to expand and her knowledge of the words, how the apply to the pictures and also how to apply them to different situations. She is a very quick learner, and I know this will progress as well.

Such a sweet demeanor she possesses and such a will to learn. She gets excited for each baby step, it never ceases to make me smile. There is something to be said about the student when she is in my last class of the night after a 12 hour day and I am thrilled to teach her (I have 8 hours at my first job then I go to Kumon). She brings such a joy to the classroom, I am truly blessed to be her teacher.

On a completely different note, I am proud of another student tonight. I began teaching him when I started at Kumon, over a year ago. He could not write his name and he could pay attention for about 15 seconds before getting distracted (which makes for a long 30 minute class). He is graduating from my class to the next classroom on Monday. Today was my last night with him. It is amazing the student he now is. He is one of my model students and will be missed greatly. He is the last of the students I started with to move up. The excitement in his eyes is definitely contagious :)

Sonic for the win!

I posted awhile ago about Sonic's Limeades for Learning Program. I hope you found a minute each day to vote to help fund things for public school classrooms to help the students learn in creative and innovative ways. I know I voted! Here is one of the projects that Sonic funded (although they were able to fund many of them!!) I like this one because it appeals to me both as a teacher and as a scrapbooker :)

It Is Time to "Cut It Out Now"

Mrs. Deon

"Home is where one starts from." --T.S. Eliot. 7 hours a day; 5 days a week. We spend so many hours in our classroom becoming a family and a team. Help us make our classroom the most welcoming, bright, and organized classroom around!

I teach at a rural elementary school in Southwestern Louisiana. Our location is within 15 miles of a major U.S. Army Base; therefore many of my students are military children. There is no doubt that the classroom make-up is diverse in cultures. Some students have never seen a large city; others have lived overseas! Our school is classified as a Title I school, with the majority of students receiving free/reduced lunch. Many families live in poverty. My students are eager to voice opinions and take active roles in their education. We operate as a team and family. They believe in themselves and they need you to believe in them, too!

From enhancing classroom bulletin boards to creating personalized student journals, this product will improve our classroom for years! We look forward to using this machine in our Language Arts lessons. We like to do many hands-on lessons and projects related to our novel studies and this will take our projects up a notch, for sure! In addition to enhancing our lessons, this product will help make our classroom more appealing and organized. Our teacher will be able to make labels and nametags galore!

This Cricut machine will allow us to add dimension and creativity to our everyday learning. When one reflects upon what made his/her educational career exciting and memorable, it is the special touches teachers were able to add into the curriculum, not the tests and textbooks. Please help make our school year more memorable and imaginative, turning our classroom into a "home away from home."*

Isn't that wonderful?!!! I just wanted to take a minute to share, so thanks for hearing me out :)
You can find all of the projects Sonic funded on www.limeadesforlearning.com

*copied from limeadesforlearning.com

Educational Literature

I recently was given a recommendation to read a book on education. I was mildly surprised that I had not heard of it earlier. I know there are many books written on education, and I do not claim to be familiar with all of them, but I have read many and am familiar with titles of others that exist, even though I have not yet read them. Motivated by my curiosity, I went to the local library's website to see if they had it-negative. Since our library has the amazing resource of being able to borrow books from other libraries, I looked at Bloomington library (which is larger than Normal's) and Illinois State University's (which is larger still, and primarily a teaching school)-negative. The closest place that had a copy of the book was an hour away! So I put in for the hold.

Since then I have received the book, The Schools We Need & Why we Don't Have Them by E.D. Hirsch Jr. and have been reading it. When I ordered the book I was aware it held ideas about education that are not taught in public universities, yet I am still surprised that ISU did not have a single copy of it in six floors, with one exclusively designated for education majors. Our professors taught us to challenge what they say and analyses it, yet this book that contrasts the beliefs is nowhere to be found in the library... interesting.

Now that I have begun reading it I am highly interested in what it has to say. The author backs his opinions by multiple research experiments and observations of children and the education system over time. Hirsch Jr rallies for a core curriculum, something I had not heard of in my four years as a student of elementary education. For those who are unaware of what a core curriculum is, it is a curriculum that is consistent and specific. For example: All fourth graders will be able to identify all 50 states within the United States of America, their capitols as well as major landforms including mountains, rivers that span half of a state or more, etc. A core curriculum is very specific so that all the fourth grade students in the school would be entering fifth grade with the same knowledge. By having a core curriculum, this does away with the information gaps between grade levels (and schools if a core curriculum was administered nation-wide).

I am able to see the value having a core curriculum would hold for a school, district and honestly it would be valuable to be implemented nation-wide. Although a nation-wide mandate would be met with much adversary by many teachers, administrators, parents and citizens. It is completely understandable why. As a teacher who has her diploma and state certificate, I was not educated about this until I took it upon myself to do so. How many other teachers have not seen the studies on this? How many administrators are aware of this. What happens when new information is found in science? Who is going to take the time to construct such rigid guidelines for teachers? There are so many questions to be answered before this can fully be put into place.

I'm sure I will post other thoughts spurred from this book, but I want to first leave you with some questions. I am answering them in the way I believe is true, but I challenge you to think about them for yourself.

I believe there are private schools that have realized this value within the United States and are striving for this. Will it ever happen in the United States of America's public education system? I can't answer that. Do I feel it would be beneficial? Yes. Will it take away teachers' creative license within their classroom? Some, but I feel that a creative teacher is still able to teach within the designated curriculum in creative and unique ways. Will it benefit the students as learners? Yes. Will it allow them to learn more within a given school year? I believe so.

Quotable

Upon browsing educational quotes, I came across one that really made me stop and think:

"The individual learning model is a foreign territory for most Net Genres, who have grown up collaborating, sharing, and creating together online." ~Don Tapscott in Growing Up Digital

I have not read his book, but it would appear to be that the Net Genres would be the students of today who have grown up with the genre of internet (net) as a key aspect in their lives. Or perhaps 'genres' is an abbreviation for generation, but either way, it refers to the students we are currently teaching.

Some may question how much our students know about and use technology. Allow me to provide you with a few examples. During the summertime I nanny children of a variety of ages. One household I work with there are two boys, ages 3, and 5. Their television is hooked up to an external hard drive, has wireless access, and is also used with a play station 2, a Wii and a blue ray player. Yes, it took me a few times to master switching between the devices. Could I do it, yes, it just took some time and understanding of what wires went where in order for the device I wanted to use to be turned on and hooked up to the right sources of power. The three year old and the five year old can and do switch between systems at a rate much more effective than I can. Do they use technology? Certainly. Another child I sit for told me that he has a time limit of five hours a day of video game and online computer playing time. Five hours?! He is certainly using technology on a daily basis, much more so than I. One of my students asked to be my facebook friend the other day. While I politely declined her invitation I wonder what reason a 10 year old has to have an account on a social networking site. I suppose it is the same reason I have an account-to keep in contact with other people. Our students are using technology.

Thinking back to the classrooms I grew up in, the teacher was lucky to have a computer in the classroom. Many classrooms now have at least three computers, and this is a good thing. But are they being used? Using computers simply for students to take Accelerated Reader tests is a waste of such a resource. There are wonderful sites online that challenge students to learn by making learning fun, and bringing it back to a format they are familiar with. We no longer have to teach students how to read a website, they grow up learning that. We have to teach them how to read a newspaper and look up a number in the phone book, because those are the things teachers grew up learning, but students today lack understanding in.

Blogs are a wonderful avenue to express thoughts and exclaim in wonder over new-found knowledge. Obviously, I am using it as such, but do I take the time to show my students how to effectively blog? I could have integrated more of that into my student teaching. Had I more time, I could have made our blog into a conversation of literature, rather than a method of reporting. A blog can be used for both, that is part of the beauty of it. I would like to try that with my first class, provided there are resources available to do so.

I would also like to try setting up a classroom wiki with my students. It would be a page where parents could track what is going on in the lives of their children while at school, as well as a safe place for students to discuss educational related material with each other. The students of today need to be able to learn in groups, it is how they grew up learning, and will be a stronger method of learning for the majority of them.

Does this mean that individualized learning has no place in the classroom and should be entirely thrown out? Certainly not! Students also need to learn to work on their own, as life will require that of them at times as well (it certainly does in higher education). I value the individual learning model, so long as it is used in conjunction with the cooperartive learning that is likely to become the norm for students. Education needs a healthy balance of both to be effective. Who am I to teach solely one way when my students learn in so many different ways? It would be selfish for me to do so.

Literacy Surprise

I love it when my students surprise me. Like this week after we did literacy STAR quizes. In a nutshell, they are a computer generated quiz to help us determine the reading level of a given student. So when all this was done, my mentor shared our students' scores with me.

It was certainly a pleasant surprise. Whereas you will always have those that are a bit behind the rest, I was amazed at the number of students we had reading above grade level. We even had a few students reading two and three grades above grade level! This was awesome to see, especially considering who these students are in our classroom as a whole. I know that they are the type of students that will be able to motivate others and encourage them to be good readers as well. I love when my students surprise me!