Skip to main content

Managing my classroom

I have not written for a while. Just getting to know my kids and spending quality time with the new lot.Setting classroom rules and making sure they work before I attempt to get down to brass tacks.


Being a PYP teacher, with 24 kids in the class and no intern, is no easy task.There are times when I raise my hands, pull my hair and feel like the figure in Edvard Munch's 'The scream'!
There are children with different demands, learning styles and the problem is that I am keenly aware of this. Needless to say I feel miserable. However, stress and frustration can easily be felt by the students and so I have to find ways and means of getting around this problem.

And that is why I love technology and yoga. The two together pack a mean punch:)
Early morning breathing and meditating to calm the kids (and um, myself) and then something as simple as google docs can make everything so easy.

Our school has assigned each teacher a task: Find a topic about our teaching practice that we want to research more about. I have opted to improve the way I teach reading and writing.
To start with, I needed to find out what my kids thought about reading and writing. What was the best way to go about it?
I have been using google docs to document my students progress in class. However, I found google forms ideally suited to my needs this time round. I created a simple reading form, which ask the students some questions.  I embedded this form into the kids' blog. When their responses came in( quite promptly), all the data was immediately and systematically recorded in my google docs inbox.

Though google docs in not new and many use it, the ease with which work can be done never ceases to amaze me.

By the way, some of the student responses are the reason I want to improve reading and writing in my class:

"I write because my writing needs to look neat"
"I write because my teacher told me to"

I've had these kids for about 7 weeks now. My work is cut out for me. I shall try and work smart, plan ahead of time and read and write a lot in order to be excited and not frustrated about work.

Wish me luck!

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Generalization-Designing Your Lessons for Conceptual Understanding (Part 3)

This post is the third of our blog post series on how to design lessons for conceptual understanding. Part 1 here Part 2 here Strategy 3 : Generalizations You may have come across Lynn Erickson's diagram on the structure of knowledge. In my IB workshop's I always like to present the avocado model alongside this diagram when I am talking about facts. The intention of inquiry-based teaching and conceptually-driven understanding (or Concept-based inquiry- whatever terminology suits your fancy)  is to enable students to make generalizations. In other words, can they transfer their learning to a new context because they have understood what they learnt.  In order to make generalizations, we need to first plan lessons that help students acquire facts/topics that are interesting  and worth knowing. Bringing in local and global issues that are relevant to the topic help students as they begin to compare the topics and see emerging patterns. Remember, facts and concepts have a syn...

Classification -Designing Your Lessons for Conceptual Understanding (Part 1)

In this series, we will discuss how we can design lessons for conceptual understanding. Having recently completed an upskilling course with IB, I felt we may all benefit from looking at some of these strategies and how they might look like in our PYP classrooms. Strategy 1: Classification    Source: Ibo.org In this post, I will be focusing on the research-backed strategy, "classification".  Chadwick (2009) highlights that classification helps develop conceptual understanding by allowing students to organize information, recognize patterns, and understand relationships among concepts.  Here are some examples across several disciplines on how I have used tools to classify. Math Class 1) In my math class (Grade 3) instead of having students simply rote learn the names of the shapes and their properties, have them sort the shapes  based on the number of sides, angles and symmetry. Even better, use the Concept Attainment Strategy (I keep returning to this strategy be...

Concepts-In-Use: Designing your lessons for Conceptual Understanding (Part 6)

  Concepts-In Use www.ibo.org In this post, one more strategy takes center stage when it comes to designing lessons that aid conceptual understanding in our students: Concept-In-Use. This strategy should be used once several concepts have been covered in class.  A great way to know whether your students are internalizing the concepts is to ask them to explain the connections between two concepts. For example:  In Math Ask them to convert a fraction to a percentage.  Or a percentage to a decimal.  Can they clearly explain the connection?  Can they use drawings to support their explanation? Can they articulate the difference between a prism and a pyramid.  How are they same?  How are they different? How can you represent data visually?  Bar graphs, pictographs, line charts are all concepts. As a designer of conceptual lessons, a teacher needs to be keenly aware of the connections between concepts.  For instance, is the Grade 3 teacher awar...