In the end...

The year is about to finish and it is time to have a glance at what has been achieved:

• loads of help for Sakura: clothes and school things.
• Wonderful students' e-portfolios
• Amazing and funny year ful of TICS
• Rubbish campaign: Newlands sorted out reciclables!
•  observations for my thesis
• and loads of love from students and parents!!!

Bye Bye 2012!!!

Science Fair

If you didn't have time to visit our stand in the Science Fair, don't miss it!

See it here!!


Science Fair on PhotoPeach

 

October

October at Newlands means... reaching the end, parents to call, examinations to design, the school sports and sometimes the science fair. But the thing I enjoy the most is HALLOWE'EN!!!

What is Halloween?

Halloween is a secular holiday combining vestiges of traditionalharvest festival celebrations with customs more peculiar to the occasion such as costume wearing, trick-or-treating, and decorative imagery based on seasonal change, death, and the supernatural. It takes place on October 31.

What does the name 'Halloween' mean?

The name Halloween is a contraction of All Hallows Even, meaning the day before All Hallows Day (better known as All Saints Day), a Catholic holiday commemorating Christian saints and martyrs observed since the early Middle Ages on November 1.

So, this year we are celebrating Hallowe’en again…..

don’t come to complain!!

Happy teachers' Day!!!!!!!!

Changing Paradigms in Education

Bring on the Learning Revolution!

I LOVE what I do, it´s what I really am....
but sometimes it is tiring!!!

Green Helping Hands

The decision made with Clau to go beyond what is just said and written on the board has been the correct one. I´m liking the idea of having students experiencing what we learn in class instead of parroting lessons learnt by heart and forgotten the following year. I love leaving a stamp on them so that they never forget the projects. Helping Hands has been very successful, students got to know different realities that people in our country live and they now know that there is something, even if it is little, that can be done to give a day of happiness to others. Now, green helping hands and the presentations is actually teaching them that something must be done in order to help our planet. Apart form repeating a lesson on how to separate rubbish, they will put it into practice. And experiencing is what makes teaching meaningful. Instead of teaching conditional sentences by drilling, for example, it has become more memorable since they went to secondary to explain the consequences of throwing rubbish the way we are doing it nowadays. I´m really liking it. I found a quote that I liked and it´s related to what I want to achieve with the shcool projects:

"The best teachers teach from the heart, not from the book"                                                                     

Author Unknown

Parents' meetings

I don´t know what my problem with parents' meetings is. I think I consider them awful experiences and I can´t cope with them. I get stressed and I feel everything is going to go wrong so I start blushing. And once this process is triggered I can´t find the way to stop it. I get conscious that I´m totally red and hot inside and I keep getting red until my cheeks are about to explode. It is something that I haven´t had the strengh to stop it, not even with NLP techniques. Once I´m there in front of everybody I panick and I forget everything!

I sometimes get anxious too. It´s a mixture of emotions I need to organize beforehand so that I don´t feel so bad about them. I think I need to build up confidence in me first of all, and then check I have everything under control. Once I notice there is something out of order, I panick and the blushing starts!

And it´s getting worse with age!!

daimartinez's Fotobabble

daimartinez's Fotobabble

Visiting Sakura

Learning intention: Behaviour

Click on "Play" symbol to listen to this post!






Voice Recorder >>

Reaching Success

Success criteria is another topic I´ve been trying hard to improve as it is my flow. I´ve spent my whole last year trying to work it out withour any "success". I´ve found this on the web:

The learning intention of a lesson  tells students what they should know, understand and be able to do, and the success criteria help teachers to decide whether their students have achieved the learning intention. Sts will asnwer the following question;

• How will I know whether I've achieved the learning intention?

So far, I´ve discovered that most of my "criteria" have been described wrongly since they couldn´t show what sts have achieved the goal! Sometimes it was out of subject, some other times it was unattainable, and on some occations it was too easy to achieve! Thus, I´ve started paying more attention to the criteria I develop for a learning intention. I´ve made some improvements and I´ve used some which could easily show sts how well they´ve worked in the class. But I still find some mistakes in the rubrics chosen for certain activities. I imagine that it has to do with practice. I won´t give up, they say that PRACTICE makes PERFECT.

Goal-Setting

My first entry will be devoted to the topic of objectives. Human beings constantly set objectives for themselves in an attempt to improve their living conditions. Once I heard someone say that human beings live their lives setting objective after objective, without goals life worths nothing. He was neither a philosopher nor an erudite; he was just a Cuban taxi driver. At that moment I jot down his ideas since I wanted to remember them for the rest of my life. I´ve found myself quoting him again and again, especially now that school year has started! We, teachers, tend to set our goals for the year, for the term, for the project, for the day, even for ourselves in relation to the group we have. Without them our teaching leads us nowhere or somewhere else we might not plan to go. And if we don´t share them with our students it might produce the same results. To be sincere, I didn´t use to share them with kids and now I see how mistaken I was! Knowing what we want helps us get it! It´s not customary to get on a train or bus without knowing where we want to go, we don´t take a plane without having decided on the place to go and we won´t reach our destination just by accident. We generally make decisions beforehand on the route we want to follow and the resources we need to get. The same happens at school! This first week has been a proof that setting goals out loud for students to know where we are going increases performance. Especially if the word GOAL is used with the kids instead of "learning intentions"! Some of the kids called themselves Messi since they felt they scored a goal at the end of the class!

Welcome!

"An empowered teacher is a reflective decision maker who finds joy in learning
and in investigating the teaching/learning process—one who views learning
as construction and teaching as a facilitating process to enhance and enrich
development."
—Fosnot (1989, p. xi)