Diary from my classroom

Our first partial is coming to a close and I am finally reaching an end in some of my units! (To a normal teacher this may seem absurd since we are 9 weeks into the year, but to me it is a huge victory and worthy of a fiesta.) I thought I would update you on how my students are doing and what’s going on in our classroom. So come on in, take your seat, and spend some time in my third grade class!

We use the Abeka – a Christian home-school curriculum – books here, but I have found them to be rather non-useful. In every subject I have either tossed the curriculum completely out the window or I have created an outline of what the book expects me to teach and then filled in all the information, materials, tests, and projects with my own ideas. There are a few problems that I see with this curriculum. First, it is designed for students living in the United States. All of the content in the book can only be truly understood by someone growing up in that culture. There are sayings and facts that you wouldn’t understand if English wasn’t your first language and you didn’t call the US your home. Second, being designed for US students, the English is above most of my students’, if not all of their, heads. The idea of letting them work from the book on their own is foolish because they would not understand 75-80% of the words. Third, the books are very much old in every way. They are the earlier versions so the information or the learning and teaching styles are outdated. And the books have definitely seen better days; every single one is missing pages, has a torn or bent cover, has drawings peppered throughout the pages, and is most likely falling apart at the spine. Don’t get me wrong, these books and materials have good intentions. I try to use them as much as I can so I’m not creating too much extra work for myself by writing all my own worksheets and tests, but I would rather go the extra mile when preparing for my classes than deal with the headache of trying to teach my students directly from this curriculum.

Reading – Originally my plan with reading was just to start at the beginning and build up my students’ abilities to read long(er) stories. I was picking 2^nd Grade-level stories to read from each week, and having fun with them! However, I quickly discovered that their comprehension skills are non-existent in both English and Spanish. They consistently failed the ‘questions’ section on their tests and whenever I asked them to do an activity such as ‘summarize’ the story, even when I explained the concept of a summary in Spanish, they had no idea what I was talking about. So I re-evaluated my plan for Reading and decided to spend more time on teaching comprehension skills rather than just asking them to read a story and translate a few of the words. If there is one thing they can generally do well, it is pronounce words so they are able to say sentences out loud, just are not able to understand them. These past two weeks we have been working on who, what, where, when, why, and how, and it has still been as much of a struggle as when I asked them to read basic stories. But, I am hopeful that if we keep working on these ideas with new stories we read, then eventually they will get them down!

History – We actually made it through a chapter in the history textbook! I do not like the textbook because it’s all about US history, which is entirely irrelevant to my students. They would not be able to develop any kind of connection to the content even if they understood the words. However, I felt brave and attempted to teach them the first chapter – Christopher Columbus. He’s a man that affected all of the Americas and the vocabulary was pretty general and useful. It took us 5 weeks to get through that chapter, and it is fair to say that they did not ‘master’ the material, but at least we made it to the end. I tried teaching it to them through reading the story from various texts, drawing the story in comic form, learning vocabulary and places that are key to the story, completing fill-in-the-blank worksheets, and even acting out the story! We had the most fun acting out the story because I made them all hats of some kind based on their character or role in the story. I was hopeful that this would be the best way for them to remember Columbus, but they still struggled on the test. Since that has been over I decided to stop teaching history (temporarily) because the next chapters are extremely irrelevant to these students and the vocabulary would be pointless to teach. So I have turned my history class into an ESL class to focus on material that is more valuable to them. Right now we are learning “to be” so ‘I am, you are, he is,’ etc. and locations in the classroom and at home. Last week they drew their dream houses to practice the different rooms in a house!

Language – This has easily been my most challenging subject to teach. (If you have any ideas, please feel free to throw them out there because I am running out of them.) Pronouns. These have been the death of my students. Indirect and direct pronouns are extremely difficult to students with English as their second language. If I think about it, there are still times when I have to think about which pronoun to use or I make a mistake. So now try being one my little ones and try understanding the difference between them. I believe they get what a pronoun is and they are almost perfect at using them in sentences, so I am ready to end the unit here. They always groan when this class comes up so it’s about time we finished.

Math – Jake told me that if my students could multiply easily and quickly by the end of the year, then I have done my job. I have taken this challenge seriously. In fact, I have nightmares about going home and finishing the school year right now before my students have finished learning about all the multiplication facts! This week we have been working on multiplying by six. I have taught them many tricks such as songs for the X3 and X4 facts, or counting by 2’s or 5’s on their fingers for the X2 and X5 facts. Soon we will start speed drills to really solidify all those facts and work on getting them to answer multiplication problems quickly. I have elicited the help of the 11^th grade math class to come teach my students how to multiply two-digit numbers by one-digit numbers. I think it will be a fun project for them and a fun day of learning for mine! I am constantly requiring my students to practice adding and subtracting because they still make simple mistakes, and I want them to easily solve those problems too. Their biggest challenge has actually been place value. Since we have to use words to express place value, that language barrier rears its ugly head again and they struggle. Luckily we are moving into money next so I can still find ways for them to practice place value.

Science – The 5 Senses – that is what our unit has been about. However, if you asked my students, they would probably tell the 5 body parts we learned in relation to the senses. We learned all about the eye for the sense ‘to see,’ the ear for ‘to hear,’ the mouth for ‘to taste,’ the nose for ‘to smell,’ and the hand for ‘to feel.’ Now, when I say we learned all about these body parts, I mean we learned the basic parts of each one and any other important words related to the sense like different flavors for ‘to taste’ and different textures for ‘to feel.’ This may have been my most frustrating and yet most satisfying unit. I would come up with really neat or unique lessons for my students to get to experience the five senses, but because of their English level, the lessons usually flopped. I would primarily just feel disappointed that they didn’t get the full experience or quite understand the senses the way that I wanted them to. On the other hand, I am most confident about their test coming up! I have a very good feeling that all of them will pass the test so we can confidently move past this unit on onto the next – plants. I have not been totally defeated by the language barrier because I have been planning exceptionally cool lessons with seeds and plants for our next unit. I figure that hands-on activities are a lot better than me lecturing, them reading, or us just learning vocabulary words.

Art – This has been the most fun class to plan for! I love arts and crafts more than anything so I have let my creativity loose to create fabulous projects for my students. We read a story called “Sock Puppets” so naturally we had to make our own. Ironically, Jake and the guys he lives with have an abnormal amount of pair-less socks so I picked out suitably clean socks for all my students. We went as wild as we could while decorating them: we glued on googly eyes, yarn for hair, and pieces of fabric cut out in ties, bow-ties, mustaches, and shirts. They looked great! Then the students all put on their own puppet shows for the class. Last week we made masks out of construction paper. The students all cut out eyes, a nose, and/or mouth from their piece of paper and decorated them to their liking. The boys all made some kind of evil, devilish looking creature while the girls made pretty, clownish looking masks. I love letting them be creative! I especially love when they run out of my classroom with big smiles on their faces eager to show everyone at the school what they made. I am now in desperate need for new markers in my classroom because we color so often. I only wish I had access to more supplies to amp up our art projects or make some creations that I never thought we could.

So there you go, that is what it’s like to be a 3^rd grader in my class. That is what we have been learning; I am constantly looking for new ways to teach them and get the information across more easily. On a positive note, I have been receiving some encouraging compliments lately. Jake interviewed a few of my students for scholarships and commented on how impressed he was with their English. He said that they would have never been able to talk to him like that last year, let alone two months ago when school started. He was shocked that they understood him and could answer his questions with somewhat cohesive sentences. The used English almost the entire time, only asking how to say a few words in Spanish. He told me that I should be very proud of them! As well, some of the other teachers have told me that they have noticed that my kiddos are using a lot more English and are excelling in the language. I could not be happier to hear that they are finally getting a grasp on the language and others are noticing their progress! I have to give the credit to God for helping me daily to teach them, because I certainly do not have the strength or wisdom to do it on my own.

Be praying for their continued progress. It’s easy for me to not notice how well they are doing or how they are improving because I see and hear them every day. With other teachers noticing how well their doing gives me hope, encourage, confidence, and perseverance to keep moving forward. Praise the Lord that they are understanding me and finding it easier to use the language!