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.
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