Day Four

Today was a productive day. Good thing, since projects are due tomorrow!

This morning we talked about Service Learning. One example is having students handmake and deliver cards to a nursing home. When my own children were in kindergarten, they took children to sing Christmas carols at a nursing home. I've gone with church groups, too.  I had wanted to have my Spanish club make Christmas cards and sing at a home this year. It was my first year to have a club at my new school. I found out that there are no club meetings in the weeks before Christmas because of other school-wide activities.  I will still put this on the 'agenda' for this coming year. We will have to make the cards and start practicing our songs in October, I guess!  I also need to think of a project for the newly formed Spanish Honor Society, preferably an outreach to the Hispanic community. The service learning book should have some good ideas!

We had snippets of time to work on projects between presentations today.  I brought the lyrics home to 'smooth' out and rehearse with the music. It's hard to have a vision, but not enough time to make the vision a reality. Truthfully, I could keep obsessing over details for another week.  As my daughter believes - 'done is better than perfect.'  (I still have trouble with that!)

Kenya Horn was our morning guest speaker. She is currently a counselor at Mississippi School for the Arts. She gave a wonderful presentation about College & Career Readiness skills. There are beautiful handouts in our binders, including a 'SCANS' Skills Assessment for employability skills. Through GAETI, I've realized that we can all teach these 'soft' skills every day, just through our interactions with students and other staff members. There is no extra preparation time needed to be a good example!

I have to admit that even good schools do not always prepare students for life after high school. I feel that my high school did, however. We wrote term papers every year for five years (8th-12th grade). I don't see how English teachers in large schools could ever have time for this arduous process with all the students they have to prepare for state testing and ACT.

Personally, I feel there is so much pressure to get good test scores that most teachers are not free to do their best work. Also, students have the idea that what they are being asked to do in school will not really help them in their future lives. There should be more opportunities for students to investigate college and careers no later than their junior year of high school. Another help would be inviting former students to return as guest speakers. The more recent graduates should be able to 'connect' with the current juniors and seniors. Hopefully, speakers would encourage them to be more serious about their own responsibilities in preparing themselves.

Mr. Aaron Bailey explained how to teach students from 'Generation Z.' These students have an average of five devices (phones, etc.) and they need constant updates.  Their biggest motivation is security.  We must learn to build relationships with this generation of students so they know you have a genuine concern for their well-being. Good technology instruction and assessment tools for these learners include Kahoot, Quizizz, Socrative, and Ed-Puzzle. I have had success with all of these, plus Quizlet.live with students from all different backgrounds. The Blend-space site looks like it will have new resources I can use. Also, Screencast-o-matic may be a great way to create teaching videos for students to use in Ed-Puzzle. I could post teaching videos in Canvas for make-up work, review and remediation. 

In Art - we painted our backgrounds and printed our stories for the tiles. Then, we had a bit of time to work on projects again.

The final presentation today was about vocabulary activities and games. Vocabulary is the key to good reading and good test scores, including the ACT.  I have used Charades and Win, Lose or Draw for foreign language vocabulary. I used something like 'snowballs' but we didn't throw the papers before looking for our 'match.' I've used this to randomly sort students into partners while reviewing vocab. at the same time!  Mr. Stickman and Word Sneak might be hard to do in the early years of language learning. They had some very good ideas, though and actually experiencing the activities will help us remember new things to use!

Well, obviously I had to finish my blog at home. We needed the last few minutes of the day to collaborate on group projects.  I have the rewritten lyrics ready. We just have to record tomorrow. Well, technically- later today since it's after midnight. 

It will be a fun day, seeing each others' projects and sharing memories of GAETI!