domingo, 19 de marzo de 2017

CORNWALL: DÍA 8 DE OBSERVACIÓN

Day 8. Wednesday, March 15th, 2017.

Portreath Primary School
Portreath is a small school in a fisherman village. The school is 1/3 of the size of our base school Treloweth. We are welcome by the business manager of the school. She showed us around and we get placed in 3 different classrooms for the morning. Portreath has a totally different vibes. It is somehow different to all the other schools we had visited so far. It feels like home.
I start off in classroom 3.
They start the morning ordering their lunches and then straight to guided reading. I get a student at a time to read with me. J I loved that.
The girl I read with is a great reader and it was a pleasure reading with her. At the end of her reading I wrote the pages we read in her reading record book together with a little comment.
I then read with a second girl. An awesome experience too.
The class is working on their own version of the “What a wonderful world song”. The kids are rewriting the song adding details about their area and Cornwall. This activity really busts their creativity and they are extremely happy showing me their versions of the song. Their songs talk about their green scenery, their beaches ready for surfers, their Cornish pasties, etc.
After class 3 I head of to class 4.
This class is a mixed between year 4 and 5 children.
In this classroom I get a chance to have a chat with Kim, a TA that is in charge of teaching Spanish to the children of Portreath.  Kim not only teaches Spanish but she also help students with difficulties throughout the school. She tells me about her experience teaching Spanish at this school. Spanish doesn’t have a set time in the timetable. It varies weekly. She is very fond of Spanish language and teaches them about Spanish language and also focuses in culture. Children are very happy to practice their Spanish with me. Kim shows me the Spanish journal the students keep with lots of activities they do during the Spanish lessons. They learn about food, colors, physical descriptions, animals, body parts, etc. Also cultural aspects like Picasso, Los Reyes Magos or Easter traditions and traditional stories in Spanish such us the three little pigs. They also practice dialogs about ordering food in a restaurant and cook Spanish recipes. And they interview their classmates about their likes and dislikes.
The kids in this class are writing the beginning of a myth. They need to invent a imaginary story they that takes place in their village Portreath or in their province Cornwall. In previous lessons they planned for the story they wanted to write using pictures and small notes about their future stories. Today they need to elaborate on the story with their plan as the starting point. Of course they can’t forget to include (where, when, who, what, why, how)
Before the end of the lesson, the teacher picks a couple of examples of children writing and she reads them aloud commenting on the piece of writing. She mentions the good parts and also the points they could improve. She talks in general so they will all check their work and improve their writings.
After this, they swop their notebooks with their partners and they get to add comments to help them improve their writing too. Partners add their comments with pencil.
BREAT TIME 15 MINUTES
After break time I go to class 1.
It was the children play time so I got the opportunity to talk to the classroom teacher, Sam, about our school systems and we got the chance to see the good and less good bits of both schools systems. It was a really productive chat, which I am really grateful I got to have with Sam. I already commented on this on a previous post and the chat with Sam only made my ideas clearer in my head.
The atmosphere in this school is definitely slightly more relaxed than in other schools in the area, maybe because of the place it is located by the sea or maybe because is further away from the major towns of Cornwall. Whatever it is I am leaving this school with a nice feeling and wishing I could be back for some collaboration in the future.

Por Maria Josefa Gonzalez Roces, profesora del CEIP Moreno Espinosa , Cebreros, Avila.