First off, I have to share that last night I had my first back to school nightmare...isn't July a bit early for those to start?! This one involved not having any lesson plans for the first day of school, not having prepped any materials for the first day of school, a chaotic fire drill on the very first day, and then two dads with guitars...random, yet still stress inducing and surely the first of many to come before I go back to work.
::sigh::
I always believe that dreams (and nightmares) are very much connected to what is going on in your life though, so I know exactly where this dream came from. Right before bed, I was working on some Kindergarten summer projects so I most definitely had school on the brain. Mrs. Bee posted about some of the
summer projects she has beek working on, and I will admit, she is doing the lion's share of the work. But she is super sweet to say that I am being a new mom and that means I have enough on my plate without die cutting thousands of letters. Yes, thousands. She's a rock star.
So last night, when Mr. Sneaker fell asleep in front of the TV at 8:30, I decided that I should get started on some of the stuff that is my responsibility this summer. You might think that as a new mama I would jump at the chance to go to bed at 8:30, but I just can't. It doesn't happen...
So, I went upstairs and took out the file folder of flags and got to work. Last year, we incorporated flags into our weekly letter work. I chose one country that started with each letter of the alphabet (preferably a country in which the first letter matched the sound that we teach for that letter, so C would be a hard c like Canada instead of China, A would be a short a like Afghanistan instead of Argentina, etc.). I created flag coloring pages for all of the countries on our list and we would introduce a new country for every new letter we learned. Each of us on the team did this a bit differently, so we decided to work together a bit more this year in order to all do what worked best for each of us last year. Does that make sense? Last year, I tried to provide the kids with additional information about each country, yet that was tough because it was hard to find "real" information about countries that wasn't stereotypical. Even talking about food was difficult because it's like telling someone that people in the US eat hot dogs and hamburgers...some people may, but that's not "typical" per se....I really try to be careful when talking about other places that I truly don't know much about because I don't want to give out inaccurate information or make children believe things are a certain way when they're not. The best ones were countries that had meaning for the kids like a student whose mom came in to share about the country my student had been born in (she was adopted). The mom brought photos, items from the country, and music from the country too. One teacher talked with the kids a lot about what the colors on the flags meant. I liked that idea because it is something consistent we can learn about each and every flag/country. I always taught the kids how to say hello in that country and Mrs. Bee did a few additional words like goodbye and thank you. We decided to divide the list of countries so we would each be responsible to figure out what the flag's colors mean and how to say hello, goodbye, and thank you for the countries on our list.
I found this great
site and it only took me about 15 minutes to write down the meaning of the colors for all of my flags. Then I spent another 15 minutes or so googling how to say those key words in each country's language. Check that off my summer to do list!
I also did some searching for new ideas on how to do Star of the Week. Our team participated in a series of trainings last year focused on how to be more culturally responsive and we how we do star of the week is one of the things we thought about modifying in an effort to make it more appropriate for various kids and their families. One idea we had is to actually assign two kids each week so that they can work together/help one another/possibly a more fluent English speaker could model language for a less fluent English speaker etc. We also liked the idea of cycling through the class twice so that kids get a second turn to be star of the week once their skills have advanced a bit more by the middle-end of the year. We still have to sit down together and really think this plan through, but I am excited about trying some new things and seeing what we can do to make this more "user friendly" for all parents.
One of the ideas I came across that I really liked was asking parents to send in a letter about their child to read to the class. Suggestions included telling a funny story or writing about why they are proud of their child. I think this idea has potential problems, such as a parent not being able to write a letter in English, but I think it has good potential in terms of being culturally appropriate and being able to learn things about students and their families that we might not learn just by asking a student to bring a family photo. I would be happy to receive a letter written in spanish and could try my best to translate the meaning for the kids, but I would not be able to do this if a letter were written in Marshallese or another native language, so I'll have to think about the potential this has for causing problems for families still learning English. I'm also thinking about the potential for some home visits, but not sure how to work it in and how to get that accomplished now that I have a baby to get home to after school.
I still have a lot of work to do related to finding good apps for our iPads, but I have to balance my Kinder work with my dissertation work and my baby cuddling and dissertation work usually gets a little bit more attention than Kinder work and baby cuddling gets the most attention of all!
