Thankful for Teaching

Hello everyone!

So I know it has been a long time since my last post but as with everyone else back in the states I have been celebrating Thanksgiving and as everyone knows during the holidays time seems to fly by faster than usual.  But here is what has been happening in the wonderful land of New Zealand...

Like I said before Thanksgiving has been the topic of focus for the past week, not only on my mind as I think about my family and not being with them on the holiday, but it has also been the topic of a couple days of lesson plans in my classroom.  Trying to explain Thanksgiving to a group of students who have not grown up with the idea of a formalized day to set aside time to think about what you are thankful for was an interesting challenge to explain.  (Also if anyone can come up with a easy way to explain what a cornucopia is and why it's a symbol for Thanksgiving let me know because all I was able to come with was that it is a thing filled with all the fruits and vegetables from harvest to show everything we are thankful for and people use them as a center piece.  Anyways...) As I was saying I spent some time this week explaing the customs and traditions of my family in relation to Thanksgiving and then challenged the students to take some time to think about what they are thankful for.  Although this took the form of a simple art project where students were asked to color, cut and assemble a paper turkey with each feather displaying one thing they are thankful for, the answers they came up with were far from simple and quite moving.

Of course many students put down the traditional "home," "family," "friends," and "pets" that have so often become the cliché responses to the timeless question of "what are you thankful for," there were a few students' responses that not only surprised me but made be begin to think that perhaps these students even at their young age may be more mindful and thoughtful than many of us are at twice there age.  The responses that surprised me the most were from those students who all too often in class seem to be the ones who cause the most trouble, speak out of turn, are too rough with their classmates, or challenge the teacher to explore and experiment with a wide variety of classroom management techniques and as a result, sadly often become the students who are seen if not at the bottom of the class surly towards the lower regions on the class expectation ladder.  However, it is preciously these students who through their thoughtful responses that reminded me that every student is a complex personality and in order to best reach those "challenging" students you must continue to hold high expectations for them.  Although I would love to display the work of all my students I have chosed a few of the more poignant ones to showcase.  As you read them keep in mind that these are not from college students, professors, or even adults but from 9, 10, and 11 year olds who were simply asked to think about what they were thankful for this year....

I am thankful for...

• "that I have such a cool culture" 
• "that my mom cooks me dinner every night"
• "that I am alive"
• "that my mom is alive"
• "that my dad is alive"
• "that God made me"
• "that I have not lost anyone I love"  (I later found out that this student experienced the death of a parent the year before)

So in the hustle and bustle that usually consumes this pre-Christmas season, may we all take time to stop, think, and really appreciate even the smallest things in our lives because as said by the students we should all be thankful that at least "I am alive."  

Once again, as has happen so often in this experience I started out teaching a lesson thinking that I would be the one imparting knowledge onto my students and it turns out that they were the ones really teaching me.  Teaching me what it truly means to be thankful.  It's not the giant dinner, the football games, the parades, and the sales that fill the stores the days surrounding Thanksgiving.  It is simply what the holiday is called "thanksgiving," taking time to simply give thanks.  No matter what form that may take, we all have so much (me especially) to be thankful for and simply taking the time amid the crazy commotion that fills the holiday season, the greatest lesson we could all learn.  

So to once again continue with the WALT (we are learning to) of the week:

Short and simple...

WALT give thanks.


May God bless you and all those you love in this holiday season and may we all be truly thankful for the many blessings in our lives.

Pictures of Geocaching

Hello,

So I forgot to include the link to the class blog that has been updated with pictures from our geocaching experience.  This website was created by the class last term and a couple of students are in charge of writing new blog posts.  Check out the pictures!

http://swansonroom10.weebly.com/room-10--swansons-blog.html

Geocaching!!

So this was a VERY busy week at school.  I have started teaching my communication lessons, writing paragraphs, and the best part of the week I taught my students how to geocache!!

It was SO much fun.  For those of you who don't know, geocaching is like treasure hunting with a GPS unit.  There are "caches" hidden all over the world and you enter their coordinates into the GPS.  Then you set off to find them.  I taught my students how to use the GPS and then sent them on a 6 cache mission that I had set up around the school.  At each cache they found a slip of paper with a word on it.  When they were all compete the words spelt out "How does geocaching relate to communication?"  Not only were they SUPER motivated and excited to do the geocaching they also had a lot of great reflections on how it relates to communication, including pointing out a lot of team working strategies and skills they used.  It was one of the those great, what I like to call, "teacher moments" (a time when you think to yourself "yep this is why I want to be a teacher.)  I finished up the geocaching fun by finding five geocaches today with my host family.  At the first one I placed our class trackable who will hopefully be making his way to Paris cache by cache.

With everything going on it's hard to believe that we've reached the half way point in our experience here.  Part of me feels like I just got here and part of me feels like I have been here forever.  It has already been a challenging experience.  Some days have been harder than others but they have all been beneficial in one way or another.  The coming weeks are sure to prove to be even more challenging but hopefully just as rewarding.  

Busy, busy, busy...

Hello All!

So I haven't written on here in awhile but that is because there has been SO much happening.  I'm beginning to do almost full control in the classroom this week.  So that means I have been putting a lot of time into preparing and creating lessons.  I'm really excited for the inquiry subject I will begin teaching this week on communication.  It will run throughout the rest of my time here.  As part of this unit I will be teaching the students about geocaching and actually setting up a geocaching route around the school.  I hope this all goes well and I know the students are really going to enjoy getting out and using some new technology.

I am also about to start teaching how to write paragraphs.    To do this I have decided to incorporate the subject of communication by organizing a monster exchange with the kindergarten class back at Sunnyside that I was teaching before coming here.  A monster exchange is when one class (my New Zealand one) draws a monster and then uses words to describe that monster (hence how I'm going to use it to teach how to write a paragraph).  Then you send the words describing the monster to another school/class (the Sunnyside kindergarten class).  That class then redraws the monster using only the clues they get from the words and then sends the redrawn monster back to the original class to compare.   I haven't attempted it yet but I am going to introduce the concept tomorrow.

So that's school, I'm settling in, loving my kids and learning a lot.  But with a lot of hard work during the week comes the chance to have some fun on the weekend and that's what I did this weekend.

This weekend all three of us girls went to Rotorua.  There we explored the Redwoods forest, did some shopping and my favorite had a cultural experience night to learn more about the Maori culture.  It was wonderful.  We got a great meal, learned about their customs, clothing, weapons, dances and how they keep their culture, language, and heritage in the ever changing "modern" world.  But wait the weekend doesn't end there because I left out the first thing we did on our Rotorua weekend...

BUNGY JUMP!! That's right, I paid someone to strap a giant rubber band to my feet and then jumped off a perfectly good platform 47 meters over a river.  To say it was a rush and a trill would be an understatement but I'm not really quite sure how else to describe it.  Well that's it for now I need to get back to planing lessons for the next couple of weeks...