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.