Keysi's learning journey in Arkansas

Evryone should keep their custumes and cultures, and that i something I really admired from our visit to the Cherokee museum and school, we learned many thing about them that we could have never imagined, and how they are still nowadays very attached to that culture as a part of their everyday living. They are hardworkers and smart. But what I admired the most from them was that they are not embarrased of who they are in front of the society, its not that they have a reason to be embarrased but it could be hard on them if people critize them for the way they live or dress, and so on Even though they could leave their culture behind for living a more comfortable life they don't do it. That is something I want to apply in my own life, that even in we live in certain society where people view things differently and criticizes them a lot, I should always be myself and be proud of who I am and I want to inculcate that to my students too.

Another thing that Ireally loved from Westwood school is the values they try to inculcate in their students. There were a lot of them but a very famous one was to be principled, a principled person is one that makes good decisions and is reasonable. Kids at that school from a very little age, are taught to be principled persons, when being in a classroom they need to behave, always use their good manners when dealing with others, being obedient to the teacher, and humble enough to admit when they did something wrong and say sorry for that, That is something that as a teacher I will try harder to inculcate in my students to contribute to their education not only as students but as human beings.

I really enjoyed those 2 weeks in Westwood school, everyone was so nice and attentive to us, even the principal on the first day told us to call her by her first name. The staff helped us througout the journey, and the experience was amazing. I really loved the organization they all have in that school, and the classroom management as well, I learned a lot from my teacher and most of her classes were based in student centered lesson, and The ELD clases they had helped me to realize how it is possible to successfully teach our kids that study English as a second language. I also learned how to discipline kids in a loving way and always calm as a person, there is no need to yell at them, us adults dont like to be yelled at, so why would we do it with a little kid. Kids are very smart and it is easy to reason with them, so instead of using a higher tone of voice when dealing with them, we must use a kind, nice voice to make the kid comfortable when talking with us.

We as a teachers sometime make a common mistake; When there is a disruption or interrumption during the class, we tend to call on the kid who is not doing the right thing. With this observation, I have learnt that kids imitate a lot, and if we always tend to call on the person who is doing the bad thing, the other kids are more likely to imitate that  bad behaviour because they want the teacher to notice them, and the class would become a mess. Kids who do the right thing could even start to feel that it is not woth it to do something good because no one notices it, and as a teacher that's the last thing we want to happen. How nice it is when the teacher only focuses on the good behaviour and congratalates kids for that, because kids will often want to do the right thing and even if there is one single studying misbehaving, he or she will eventually want to do the right thing to when they see others making good choices.

We just started our observing week at schools and I am very happy with the school I'm in, the people have been so nice to all of us and really make us feel special, I've really learned a lot from the teacher in which class I'm observing, how she treats her students and not only teach them academic things but also values and how to be an obedient and a caring person. I've also had the opportunity to observe another kindergarten classroom and it's so amazing as well. These teacher do what kids love the most and look for different ways to make learning fun. Kids in those classrooms  sing, interact with each other, dance and are disciplined in a super loving way. For example I really like that, when a kid does something a little not so nice to another student, and the other tells on him, the teacher does not immediately make a judgement, instead he call both students hears both of their versions of the story, and talks to them in a peaceful manner teaching them how im...

We had the amazing experience of going to the movies here in Arkansas, I personally am not a movie person and I thought I was not going to like it but I really enjoyed this movie in particularly called "Night School". It was about a man who had dyslexia and other problems and for that reason he was very bad when doing maths or when studying, but along the movie, even thought he kept failing the tests to graduate, and everyone lost faith in him except for his teacher (even his father), he finally could graduate. This taught me important lessons: First, it taught me that we should never give up. Second, it made me realize the huge effect that it has when a teacher strongly believes in his/her students no matter how many times they fail or that it seems impossible for them to succeed. And I would really like to apply that strong conviction in them when I go back to Panama and see them again.

On Tuesday  9th we attended to a teaching ELD seminar that was really useful to me since they taught us how to identify or decide the levels or proficiency for the activities that we give to our students through techniques, for example they had posters on the walls and had us in groups to walk around the hall to identify which one of those posters was Beginners (which could be early or late beginners) intermediate and advanced. We can identify that through sentences, complex words that might be in them as well as words in past. For example I learned that Beginners students have limited receptive and expressive English skills, also I really liked the technique they used to have us in groups, we were given a page that said music genre appointments and the genres of music were Salsa, rock, jazz, country and we had to have one or two partners and write their names on the page for each music genre so whenever they played one of those genres we had to look for our partners and they did t...

Being able to write a poem is not an easy task for me, but with this activity I've found that writing a poem using something as easy as the 5 senses and looking to a colorful picture to inspire you, can help you a lot. I didn't know about such an amazing technique, and I think it could help my students at school a lot when writing their own short simple poems in class and since I teach science, it is easier for me to implement the senses techniques when we teach that topic to our kids. Things like plants animals people, stages of life or even food are nice topic to inspire them to create a poem and in the same way for me to get to know their feelings, preferences and emotions even better.

There was a format where the teacher gave us an online activity to develop with a partner . The teacher provided us examples of how to develop the activity, (which is something we must always do for our students to have a guide and know what they are required to do). I thought this way of having students to work together in an online platform was nice because: -The teacher was able to give us inmmediate feedback to help us to know right away what we exactly needed to improve. -It helped us to see other groups' works and compare or get help by seeing or getting ideas from what others could do. - It was practical. When making mistakes, instead of using papers, since students could erase their mistakes without worrying about tearing up the paper or something like that, students could do a cleaner work. I plan to apply this with my students by learning how to create this activity online, then have them go with me to the computer lab at school for them to see a different way of...

Planning a lesson to me, is not a simple thing since every aspect, technique or method should be carefully taken into consideration when trying to apply them in our lessons. We were able to present a microteaching lesson, which for me was a little difficult since we had to apply things in a different way than what we are used to. Lessons should have been student centered, include schemata (which was a new word for me, and I learned that it is similar to build background). Also, it was very important to have very clear objectives and to be specific when setting them.  After presenting it I have learned that: We should always model and ask questions to see if students really understood and were paying close attention. Also, it is of great importance for us as teachers, to give directions first and then have students to move. If we do the opposite, students will be likely to start working without listening to the instructions the teacher was going to give and the activity ...

To  celebrate  for me means to embrace something and the word  diversity  is an extense word and I really like it. For me, it would be boring if it was all the same thing. This lesson about celebrating diversity, was really special for me since it was introduced to us in a different perspective of viewing things. I really enjoyed the video " Welcome to Holland, by Emily Perl". It was so nice to see how a mother view life as a journey. She was going to have a baby, and she expected it to be healthy, but things came out different for her. She gave bith to a son with special needs, and she realized that her journey in life was not going to be bad, but that it was just going to be different.  She even described it as  a very special and lovely journey People with special needs or disabilities, are often discriminated or made fun of,  by other people. They are not treated the way they need or deserve, nor included into society in the way they should be...

Teaching vocabulary  means more than just teaching our students new words in a lesson. With our lesson about this topic, I have learnt that  teaching vocabulary also includes: Phrasal verbs: These are verbs that work together and mean something different than if we translate verb by verb and have a specific meaning. For example:  Look up or look down . Synoysms: Words that have a similar meaning. Eg.  Big / huge. Content words: Such as nouns, adjectives and so on. Idioms: Sayings of phrases originated from a specific country or culture, such as: That was a piece of cake,  which means that something was so easy. It was nice that in this lesson, we could rank the importance of things we teach according to the time we dedicate to them. As for me, this is my rank: 1. Vocabulary 2. Listening 3. Writing 4. Speaking 5. Grammar 6. Reading. And what determines the amount of time I give to each of the above in my classes? In my case, it is based on the...

It is very common for us Spanish speakers, to get confused with some English sounds. To me the most challenging thing was to distinguish or to be able to pronounce  the  /tʃ/  vs   /ʃ/ sounds. I was literally saying things like: "Teasher" instead of "Teacher". I have learned that the sound  /tʃ/  , is shorter than the sound  /ʃ/  . You can pronounce the sound " /ʃ/  " as long as you want, but the sound " /tʃ/  " should always be short. Also, I have learned how to distinguish between a word in plural's different pronunciations. It was nice for me to learn during class that it depends on the word in singular being pronounced in voiced or unvoiced. I've learned that: -  Y ou pronounce the ending /s/ if the verb ends in a voiceless consonant sound: /p/, /t/, /k/, /f/, /T/ -  Y ou pronounce the ending /z/ if the verb ends in a voiced consonant sound: /b/, /d/, /g/, /v/, /D/, /l/, /m/, /n/, /N/, /w/, /j/ or a v...

True Colors.  I started to wonder... "What was the activity about? What are we about to do?" By listening to a song,  an interesting  activity was about to begin. At first, a survey "True Colors Survey classified by category helped me to analyze each aspect of my personality , first my values, then my motivations, communication, work, supervision, recreation, childhood, youth, education, love, that helps me to identify which is mytrue color, my personality, my taste, my  way of dealing with people and my way of treating them and expectations of life. Being organized into groups, according to our color, in my opinion, helped us to display the aspects of our personality by using out imagination as a team, to decide what will be better to write or draw on our poster. My personal color is blue, blue people like to bring unity to society. I learned that it keeps everybody working together. Blues are the mediators of the world, the peacemakers. In my personal case I wo...