A journey through learning

Hello and welcome to my teaching portfolio. This is a space to share my teaching experience and my beliefs. Feel free to browse around!

Keeping students motivated isn’t an easy task, especially in times of technology. Children, for instance, have short attention spans and prefer now to later. The first key to motivate them is to show your own enthusiasm. If a teacher is not excited about what she or he is doing, nobody will be. Mixing up activities is also another way to make students like and participate in the class. Using a variety of teaching methods include all types of learners and avoid boredom. Relating lessons to student’s lives is another great strategy to get their attention. Sports, music, and activities that make they feel identified will boost up their interest in the class. Taking the students out of the classroom is also effective. It can be a field trip or just having the class somewhere inside the school. I’ve been trying to use these strategies on a daily basis.

Five years from now, I expect to be working full time as an English teacher. Some of my goals are: Inspire: I want to inspire and encourage my students to learn more and more and to be and do whatever they feel happy about. I expect that my passion for the English language and for teaching might help them find their passion, whatever it is. Learn: as a teacher, I learn something new every day. Teaching requires us to step out of ourselves and through this we learn about ourselves as teachers and as persons. Change: I want to be able to touch students in a way that can change then for the better.  I believe my main strengths as a teacher are the will to learn always more, the patience, the knowledge to understand that each student is unique and has his or her own pace.

iStock image I take an approach to teaching and learning based on Cognitive Constructivism. Piaget's theory of constructivism claims that children produce knowledge and form meaning based upon their experiences. In this context, the role of the teacher is very important. The practitioner serves as a guide; a facilitator whose role is to aid the student.  That said, I use some tools that help me achieve this approach:     Collaboration: children work in groups, sharing materials and responsibilities. It helps them build interpersonal skills.   Integration: connection to what is been teaching in one lesson to other lesson of the same subject (intradisciplinary) or other subjects thus making the approach interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary.   Narratives: storytelling allows children to explore the symbolic potential of language, create and use their imagination.   Play: children learn through playing. Experiments: hands on activities allow children

Being with twenty 5 years-old was a really enriching experience. For my first lesson, I brought them a puppet show. It was about a cricket who had lost his guitar and couldn't chirp anymore. I made the puppets from EVA and printend material founded on internet Presentation at Woodville In the second lesson, children were able to work on different activities related to the same thematic unit: bugs. I divided them into groups. Ongoing finger bug project Counting body parts: using numbers and vocabulary For lesson three, children went on a bug hunt. I hid papper bugs all over the hall, a big room where kids can run around, and they had to look for it, using a table sheet with picture of different bugs and numbers. The bug hunt The bug sheet In lesson four I used "The very busy spider" story and we made a big group web. The book The animated video: Children enjoyed the activities and were able to produce interesting art

I've done my practicum in Kindergarten 5.  Here is the group diagnostics:

Woodville is a bilingual school founded in 1961 and located in San Carlos de Bariloche.     Here is the institutional report:

I had my practice at Woodville School. Lessons plans 1, 2, 3 and 4: