My personal reflection

The winter term is finishing, and now I can say that, during these last months, I have learned a lot of things that will be very useful to me as a teacher. Four months ago, I explained what I thought it could be a successful English class in pre-school, talking about some ideas as introducing a puppet to direct the class to get the children’s attention and teaching the students through games and songs, doing the activities funnier and engaging. Now, I know much more about how to manage a language classroom.

I have learned the importance of meeting the individual needs of our students, the importance of being connected with student’s families and the importance of self-reflection on our own job. Also, I have learned a lot of methods to get and keep the student’s attention and to keep them motivated. I have learned a lot of internet resources and tools that are very useful to teach our students, creating my Personal Learning Environment and learning about the importance of it. With all this information I could create my personal classroom management handbook, which I think will be absolutely useful for me in the future. I’m sure I will keep adding on it all the things I will learn with my personal experience too. This is the image link to my Decalogue:

As a last reflection, I want to say that I have realized the importance of being connected with other teachers, sharing with them information and reflections. And for this reason I’m sure that I will keep using all the social networks that allow me to do this. With this subject I have learned a lot of interesting and useful things that make me feel more prepared as a teacher, but I’m sure I need to learn a lot more, and I am looking forward to discovering it.

CLIL (Content and Language Integrated Learning)

During the last years the interest in CLIL has been increasing significantly in Europe. The CLIL refers to situations where subjects, or parts of subjects, are taught through a foreign language with two main goals: the learning of content and the simultaneous learning of a foreign language. But it doesn’t consists of just a translation of the lesson content into another language. The key issue is that the learner is gaining new knowledge about the 'non-language' subject while he is using (and learning) the foreign language. In this way, language is used as a medium for learning content, and the content is used in turn as a resource for learning languages. So CLIL promotes content learning to an equal position to that of foreign language learning.

Personally, I think that it’s a great idea, because sometimes teaching a language to children can be boring and non meaningful for them (sometimes students are only learning vocabulary and grammatical aspects). So this way, we can teach any curriculum area at the same time that they learn and use English in a real situation. With CLIL, the language and the non language content are placed without specifying the importance of one over the other. So it may be the best approach to incorporate a foreign language and to promote multilingualism and language diversity, so important in the fast changing world that we are living nowadays.

Developmental Carachteristics of Preschoolers

In a previous post, I talked about the importance of meeting individual needs of our students, teaching them bearing in mind the individual differences between them. This differences can be caused by different factors, as their social and familiar background and their own personality.

But today I want to talk about a factor related to the developmental characteristics of our children, which will be different among them, depending on their age and their birth order. For this reason, as teachers, we have to know what can we expect from our children depending on their developmental stage. I have done a table with some characteristics that I found very important to keep in mind as English teachers:

Of course there are more developmental characteristics that I suggest you to check, because it could be very useful for you.

As a last idea, I would like to say that we mustn’t underestimate children’s capacities. Sometimes we don’t ask them some task thinking that they won’t be able to do it. But you would be surprised of the things they can actually do… 

Teaching and Learning Management

This week I have read an article called "Rethinking Classroom Management". Just as the title says, this article aims at defining and describing this concept from a different perspective. The main idea is that behavioral issues should be addressed through teaching and learning considerations based on the idea of behavior for learning rather than beahavior management. So maybe instead of classroom management we should talk about teaching and learning management, which is wider than the traditional concept. It includes three interrelated areas:

Organizational issues. What kind of working atmosphere is needed to reach the goals? It includes the rights and duties, that must be clear and explicit, building them up together with our students. The process must be dialogic and interactive rather than a one way process (it's not only the teachers who set the rules). One idea that I find very interesting is the notion that rules should describe desired behaviors rather than list unwanted ones.

Curriculum issues. What do I have to teach? What methods am I going to use? What am I going to do to involve students so that they are fully engaged and not bored and disruptive? Teaching implies being able to establish goals in terms of what to teach (curriculum) and how to teach (methodology).

Social issues. The climate in the classroom is crucial when determining the quality of learning that takes place. Pupils learn more and better if they are in a safe, secure and accepting classroom.

Any isolated decision within an area will no ensure any learning progress. An integration of organisational, curriculum and social issues is required to guarantee a successful teaching and learning management. So these decisions must be coherent: if children are often asked to work cooperatively, it will make sense to distribute tables and chairs in groups. If relationships among students need to be improved, try to avoid competitive games as a learning strategy.

Using Puppets in the Preschool Classroom

Sometimes children may be used to hear you speaking in their maternal language, so it could be a bit confusing for them to hear you suddenly speaking in English. For this reason, some teachers introduce an intermediary object between them and their students in the English classroom. It can be any kind of object like a magic hat, which will make that, every time that you wear it, you automatically speak in English. However, I prefer to use puppets to direct the English classroom. They are magical for preschool students, being a really good way to get the kids attention. I think that puppets encourage students to communicate more and are great teaching tools in the preschool classroom.

The first day of class it's important to introduce him as a new friend who is coming from far away to visit us. His name has to be in English and it would be great that he has the same age as children. We can show them where are he from and talk a little bit about his country. We must tell them that he speaks another language and we can only talk to him in English. 

Some teachers use the puppet only as a reference (the puppet whispers them things that he wants to say and the teacher repeat it to the classroom). But the most effective puppets talk directly to the children and even introduce lessons. In this case, teachers use a different tone of voice to speak through the puppet.

Create rituals with the puppets. Children respond well to repetition, so use it to your advantage. Every time your bring out the puppet you can say the same thing and you can do the same thing. First day of class the puppet can introduce himself to the students, using the main phrases to introduce ourselves ("hello", "how are you?", "my name is..."). And we can also teach the song that will become a part of the daily routine. This is an interesting video that can give you some ideas about teaching English with puppets:

When not in use, give the puppet a special seat and we can use it the days that children are not in work as a way to get their attention again. Kids will love him so we can use it as a reference ("Mr. Bear is very proud of you", "Mr. Bear don't like kids who hit their peers"...).

I have seen it and the result is amazing ! I really recommend you try it in your classroom :)

The Benefits of Blogging as a Student/Teacher

This is the first time that I am writing a blog. I have only writen a few entries but I am realizing that blogging offers me a lot of benefits. 

Firstly, blogging gives me the opportunity to express myself by writing about my personal reflections and ideas about what I'm learning.  It's like my personal diary, where I can post things that I consider interesting to remember as a teacher. So, this blog is my personal storage of resources, information and personal experiences related to teaching practices in childhood education. Here I can store all this information, without occupying unnecessary space in papers. In this way, I can have my thoughts and knowledge ordered without losing it.

Also, all this information can be useful for other people. Every time that I post something in my blog I am sharing it with all of you, who can comment my posts. So I can get your responses to my questions, your viewpoints and your thoughts. By receiving your feedback, I can learn a lot of new things from you too, getting different points of view and a more critical vision about what I'm sharing.

Moreover, blogging is a good way to be connected with other education colleagues in order to share knowledge, resources and experiences that can be useful for all of us. We have to be constantly recycling ourselves because our society is constantly changing. And blogging can make it possible to discover other points of view and other ideas and ways to teach.

Differentiated Instruction in the Preschool Classroom

This week I have read an article called “Meeting individual needs with young learners”, which explores the characteristics of a differentiated instruction teaching model. This methodology consists in teaching students bearing in mind the individual differences among them. Each student has his own level of ability, his strengths, his weaknesses and his preferences and interests, so everyone in the class should be treated differently. 

The authors of the article suggest some methods and strategies to approach to this teaching model. I have classified some of them thinking about the different components involved in the teaching process which I consider very important in a differenciated instruction model:

1# One strategy related to the content that we want to teach, is to include varied tasks of different difficulty levels and provide meaningful work for students who finish assignments or class work earlier or faster than others. Also, it may be interesting to provide multiple ways and materials to work the same subject.

2# Another example related to the learning process that I find interesting is that students work in groups. In this type of activities, students work together and support each other in working toward a common goal, so students can contribute to the best of their individual characteristics and strengths and they can learn from each other. 

- One strategy is to group the students according to interests. Having all the students who like animals reading a story about animals and all the students who like monsters reading a story about monsters will promote interest and productivity. 

- Another strategy is to group the students according to abilities. One great way to do this is to put a student who is just learning English in the same group as someone who has an advanced level. The advanced students can help the lower level students while the lower level students are helping to reinforce the concepts to the advanced ones.

3# Related to the products of the teaching process, teachers can use different ways to assess the students comprehension. If you have told a story and you want to know if a student have understand it, you can ask him to tell you about what happened in the story. But if your student likes to draw, maybe you can ask him to draw you a picture of the story you just read.

4# One last factor to keep in mind is the learning environment. Early education classrooms are designed to provide children with a variety of experiences throughout the day. Some students learn better by moving around and interacting. Other students are more shy and prefer to work alone. Make sure there are spaces in your classroom that are designated for quiet activities as well as interactive ones. Your learning environment should make all students feel safe and positive to get the most out of them.

With this article I have learned that to be effective with differentiation, teachers must find a way to meet the needs of all the students in their classroom. So we have to talk with the students, asking them their opinions and seeing how things are going and finding out what they are interested in. Teachers still need to recognize that children learn differently. We have to create multiple paths so that students with different abilities and interests can develop themselves.