Was able to return to my Primary 1 class on my final day at St. Patrick's Catholic School in Denny. So lovely to see all of my old students and read them one final story from America. This is has truly been the most memorable, remarkable and formative experience of my life. Thank you to all of the people who made it possible including the lovely Laura Stachowski, head of Global Gateways at Indiana University, also my two lovely mentor teachers, Victoria and Antoinette and last but certainly not least, my amazing host-mum Morag Duff, who made Scotland my new home. Thank you all and I hope to return again soon.
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Making grammar fun in Primary 5 with the introduction of Mad Libs. We learned about parts of speech through writing our silly, communal classroom story and then I gave the children some time to work independently. Definitely one of the highlights of my teaching career considering the students were unfamiliar with Mad Libs and so were roaring with laughter over the hilarity of the resulting stories.
During school today, St. Patricks and I were fortunate enough to welcome the woman who made this experience possible, Yvonne McBlain. Visiting from the Falkirk Council, she came right in the nick of time to see my class finish up their Chicago narratives. After interviewing some students about what it was like to be part of this teaching cultural exchange, she so thoughtfully put together her own blog post that you can find here: http://tinyurl.com/zlol5ll.
Hopefully our participation in the Global Gateways program can further blaze the trail for future teachers to complete their student teaching in Scotland. This week I began work with Primary 5 students, ages 8-9, and even though I was new to their classroom, they welcomed me with open arms and a great deal of curiosity surrounding my American citizenship. Due to this great amount of interest and constantly under storm of questioning, I decided to use my first writing unit to teach them a bit about my home town of Chicago. Since the students were already working on a Comparative Cultures Unit, I began my unit drawing on this prior knowledge and skill set. Informing my students we would be taking a virtual tour around Chicago, I told them we would debrief afterwards to draw comparisons and contrasts between Scotland and the US (via Chicago) using a venn diagram tool.
I tried to make my tour of Chicago as immersive as possible for these wee learners and "tourists". Utilizing Prezi, videos, music and images, I took them all the way from the Willis Tower to a Chicago Public School to Lou Malnati's deep dish pizza. Following up the next day with a writing task, I told the students they were going to imagine their families had decided to move to Chicago. There task was to write a narrative that described their experiences moving to this new places as well as their fears, their hopes and to detail as much of their new life as possible. The objective was to be as creative and imaginative as possible using the information we had learned yesterday. The students responded to the assignment with great enthusiasm and I have attached some of their fantastic work below. I was impressed with the attention to detail and amount of emotional honesty they put forth in their writing. Truly a meaningful and immersive learning experience, one which I hope to use again as a teacher. This picture was taken after a truly immersive Pirate Unit in which students got to virtually experience life as a pirate through the power of imagination, a wee bit of chalk and some life size ships. Students crafted these ships within collaborative groups and once ship-shape, completed typical pirate chores including swabbing the deck and searching for treasure.
This was definitely one of the more eventful weeks of my life. After arriving in Scotland my lovely Host Mum Morag welcomed me to the Scottish shores with open arms. We both have a penchant for cooking and I’ve been enjoying the clean eating of the scottish diet mixed with her fabulous home cooked meals. Morag’s house is located in the small town of Letham as I may have mentioned before. This week she took me on a walk about the surrounding area so that I could get a feel for my surroundings and begin to run in the mornings more regularly. I have to say that though Scotland is stereotyped for its cloudy weather and lack of sun I have been lucky to experience a wide plethora of Scottish Weather. It seems that every 10 minutes the weather changes but when the sun finally comes out, goodness it it pretty! The town of Letham is surrounded by small groupings of homes, the hills of Stirling in the distance and wind farms as well as sports its very own castle known as Airth Castle. Apparently it was recently renovated to include a fancy high end gymnasium and after inquiring after the price a month’s membership would be I decided I would probably just be going on plenty of morning runs through the countryside raep seed. Probably most importantly is that I began work at St. Patricks Roman Catholic Primary School in Denny. I knew that my first day I would be quite flustered between getting my bearings in a new surrounding and furthermore the students’ charming accents. The first day the 5 and 6 year olds ran up to me giving me hugs, smiles and chattering away about everything and anything. It’s easier for me to understand them not that I have had a week to get acclimated but I confided to them that they would need to be patient with me as I come from America and the way we talk is much different than the way they talk. I knew that there would be some differences in our accent but I had anticipated that many words used in America that carry a different meaning in Scotland. Simple classroom phrases like, "Turn it in" only elicited a bunch of blank stares and my lovely supervising teacher whispered to me that they probably were not familiar with that phrase. Also, I've had to adjust much of the way I speak and teach especially when it comes to literacy and phonological instruction. When stretching out words for children to help them build phonemic awareness I've had to use a slightly broken Scottish accent so that I can help them match what they're familiar with to how it is spelled. For instance I noticed with the word, "children" when I elongated the word with an american accent to them sounded like "chilllljjjjrrrriiiin"and they all promptly wrote "js" instead of "ds" whereas when I said the word with more of a scottish brogue, "chilllddddrrrreeeennnn", they were able to write it out properly. All and all it has been a great personal learning experience for me and I look forward to growing together with the students in the coming weeks. Because St. Patrick's School is a Catholic school I attended by first mass with the students on the second day of my teaching. They were all so excited to go to the church and all of the head teachers made sure to make the class aware of all the expectations. Despite that there was still quite a bit of laying their heads down on the pew I think mostly due to the hour and a half nature of the mass. As someone who is Jewish though, I was nervous that at first I might feel uncomfortable in such a religious school that was not my own but the staff have made me feel so welcome, with the head teacher even personally introducing me to the Priest himself. We chatted briefly about Chicago and where he had visited so by the time mass was over I almost felt like one of the group. Along the lines of social niceties, manner and chatting I've found Scottish people to be exceptionally chatty and humorous. Everyone I have approached has been so eager and open to talking about both my experiences in the States and providing helpful tips and information on the Scottish way of life. What with my morning runs and new familiarity with Scotland, I'm starting to feel fully immersed in the Scottish way of life which is exactly what I wanted. Successfully arrived in Scotland! After countless setbacks, difficulties, car rides, plane rides, I finally made it to the land of rolling green hills, windmills, sheep and waterfalls. As the plane flew into Edinburgh Airport, it felt like the first few moments of Brigadoon with mist and cloud cover then all of a sudden we broke through the clouds to reveal the beautiful green hillside below. I was overcome with so much gratitude and excitement to finally arrive in Scotland that I even started to tear up.
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