#elementary school teaching

[dwendog]

Just looked at the syllabus, and I have technically covered all the grammar I have to teach this year. Which means I have a full term to teach them about why we do not put apostrophes next to every s in our writing, and then revise things like “Why paragraphs make it easier for me to mark, and therefore work to your benefit”, “Descriptive language makes your writing more interesting, and therefore helps me stay awake while I’m marking, which, again, can only work to your benefit”, and “For the love of god, stop putting random capital letters everywhere, and then using lower case ones for the first word of a sentence, because it makes me want to cry and stab things”.

[dwendog]

Educhums, help a girl out. We’re doing celebrations this term, and I’m looking for Christmas style celebrations in non-Christian cultures. My understanding is that if you’re looking at other major religions, the big festivals are Ramadan/Eid for Muslims, Diwali for Hindus, and Rosh Hashanah for Jewish people, but I was not even remotely raised in any of these cultures, so I could be super wrong. Can anyone confirm/deny this? Also, if you have year 2 appropriate resources for teaching about any of these celebrations (or any others, for that matter), it would be awesome.

[dwendog]

When you’re teaching tiny humans (i.e. my year 2 class), how many sentences do you expect a paragraph to have? We’re doing paragraphs later this week, and I’m not quite sure how to frame it. I’m just introducing the concept to them, because the syllabus says they should be familiar with the idea, and I’m also sick of getting a page and a half of writing that is one block of text. We’ll being doing persuasive writing later in the term, and I’ll introduce them to OREO paragraphs then, but for now, they just need an understand of what a paragraph is and when we start a new one.

I like the idea of using a hamburger diagram, but they all seem to work on the principle that you need at least 3 fillings on a hamburger, and that seems a bit rough for 7 and 8 year olds. At the very least, I think they should be doing a topic sentence and one other sentence, but adding a concluding sentence to that seems like a bit of overkill, and expecting a topic sentence, two content sentences and a concluding sentence seems like it’s a bit unreasonable.

Thoughts? Suggestions? No real ideas, but sympathy for my confusion?

[dwendog]

Housemate: Oh, what are you cooking?

Me: Playdough.

HM: What?

Me: We're comparing fractions this week, and the kids need something they can physically manipulate and they've already cut and folded paper several times, so I thought we could use playdough. But I don't have any at school at the moment, so I'm making some.

HM: I didn't realise that was in teachers' job descriptions.

Me: I mean...I guess it's not technically. We just kind of...find ourselves doing these things.

HM: Your job is kind of weird, isn't it?

Me: When I stop and think about it, yeah, it really is.

[dwendog]

Apparently “I’m teaching capacity on Tuesday” is not really an adequate explanation for the 2.5 kg of coloured rice drying on the dining table.

[dwendog]

#Educhums, please help me teach handwriting

I’ve got some year 2s who desperately need help with handwriting. I need to work on pencil grip with a lot of them, and while it’s not technically causing problems with legibility, it’s the same incorrect way I used to hold mine, and my writing actually improved considerably once this was corrected. I don’t know whether I should be pushing this or not, because it took me a LONG time of concerted effort to correct my own grip, and the kids are not enjoying my attempts to fix theirs because it’s uncomfortable for them to hold their pencil the right way. Thoughts?

I also have two who just don’t form letters correctly. One of them forms almost all their letters from the bottom and all their circles go anti-clockwise, so they’re basically doing everything backwards (not a lefty - I did check this the other day, because I can sort of see how using the opposite hand would lead to reversed letter formation), and their writing is bordering on illegible at times. My other student with incorrect formation also has vision impairment and poor fine motor skills. We obviously need to work on the fine motor skills, which will improve the handwriting, but I think the letter formation needs to be addressed separately, too. Again, the writing is borderline illegible a lot of the time. Short of actually sitting with them and supervising handwriting sessions (I barely squeeze in a half hour handwriting lesson each week as it is), does anyone have ideas for working on their letter formation? I have 16 kids, 8 of whom have severe literacy issues, and the only support I get is that my EALD kidlet gets withdrawn for half an hour each week for one-on-one with the EALD teacher (don’t even have parent volunteers atm), so I just cannot physically provide the amount of one to one time needed to improve handwriting.

[dwendog]

Fraction Penguins (TPT Freebie). MASSIVE hit with year 2. Plus I got to play with my staple gun to to them up for parents’ night tomorrow, so it was wins all round.

[greatpowers63]

On Being an ALT in Japan Part 2

On Being an ALT in Japan Part 2

On Being an ALT in Japan Part 2

by Kevin Burns (Tokyo, Japan)

On Being an ALT in Japan Part 2

On a bright morning in April, Walker goes to one of the two elementary schools he will teach at. There has been no meeting with the teachers he will work with, there have been no introductions with the teachers he will “team teach” with. There has been no instruction about how to teach. Walker is not…

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