New Chapter at TweedleWink Playhouse

I've been so uber busy at my new school - TweedleWink Playhouse. It combines right brain education with Montessori elements, and I can see the children just adore coming to school. And so do I! I really love school. There's a reason I am willing to travel so far to come to school - PASSION. It is my dream school. I love how the program is beautifully designed to blend the best of Montessori philosophy with right brain education. All children learn differently at different paces, thus we follow the child and let them lead the learning.

At the same time, the children are exposed to so much because a child's early years from birth to six are the period when they have the greatest capacity to learn.They are exposed to famous composers and classical music pieces, world cultures and foreign languages, science concepts, famous artists and art pieces, and so so so much more! 

Besides imparting knowledge, we focus a lot on character-building - encouraging them to be kind, helping them deal with frustrations, assisting them in building their confidence, encouraging them to be independent. It's a tough job, but I absolutely positively love it to bits!

These are some snapshots of what happens in school! :) 

Baking muffins when we visited England

Working on dinosaur montessori cards

Baking Italian bread

Cooking French toast

Working on Montessori Colour Box 3

Art appreciation: Paul Gauguin

Art Appreciation: Winslow Homer

Art Appreciation: Claude Monet

Learning about volcanoes 

Preparing ingredients to make ratatouille

We made ratatouille when we visited France

Having a puppet show

Love it? I know I do!

Currently...

THIS WEEKS THEMES:
LEARNING, GATHERING, GIVING, WORKING, PLAYING

Me:

LEARNING about Montessori for my work. Looking forward!

GATHERING my thoughts. Or rather trying to. Overwhelmed with thoughts of jobs and buying house and finishing work and saying goodbye. Good thing school break is coming up in two weeks!

GIVING gifts. To mothers. To teachers. To students. To friends.

WORKING hard!! With the parent teacher meeting coming up, it's time to type up reports and file up portfolios.

PLAYING with my iPad quite a lot haha. Playing puzzles mental challenge and stuff.

The kids:

LEARNING about animals this month. We just heard real animal sounds and it's really interesting. Real pigs don't actually say oink oink! I wonder who came up with that. Haha

WORKING and PLAYING with animal puzzles and all the cool apps I have on my iPad! Hahaha. Loving Wee Sing where you can listen to animal sounds and also sounds of musical instruments.

Currently

I am currently...

ADMIRING the Montessori method. I am reading about Montessori again, and her work is uber inspiring.

LOVING all the little ones in class. (Duh) haha.

CLEANING the classroom with dettol every day! Every toy and material. A lot of work, but it's a precautionary step to make sure the Evil Hand Foot Mouth Disease doesn't attack anyone!

CREATING a new theme board. May's theme is Animals and I'm doing animals under water!

IPad

Every teacher should have an iPad. Really. So that you can facebook instagram and check email in class. Haha no just kidding.

It's so uber convenient. When you are teaching new words, you don't need to prepare flashcards. Just google search. Children will enjoy looking at the ipad more than at flashcards too. Even though its the exact same picture. You don't need to print and laminate. You can enlarge the picture easily. Children have spontaneous questions? Just look it up online!
Teacher, what does a mango tree look like?
Wait ah, let me find the pic.
Wham, immediately you get the pic!

The apps are amazing and cheap. The kids and I are enjoying Letter School. Sometimes, we do it one by one, or two by two. Sometimes I use it as a whole class activity. They clap and cheer and are so excited to see the animations!

The iPad is the best gift I've gotten :)

Imagination

Children don't need expensive toys. They just need open ended materials and their imaginations!

Art

There's time for structured work, where everyone has the same end product.
And there's time for open ended art. The kids painted using cotton buds today. I think it's beautiful :)

Letter writing

I purchased my first apple app today...Letter School! It's educational, so it's ok. Haha. I downloaded the lite version first and let my students try it and they absolutely love it. Even I look forward to see what the animation will be. So I decided to buy the full version. It only costs 3 dollars, which is about RM9, and I think it's a good buy. I really believe that this is the new era of education and we must move forward and change our ways of teaching. This is definitely a really really fun way of learning how to write.

Which brings me to another point...how strictly should we follow the rules of letter formation? I realized that different apps sometimes show different letter formation, eg. when writing letter d, do you start with the line or start at the curve? What I learnt in college is the proper way is that you start at the curve.

Some books teach two separate strokes for a letter, eg. for letter a, you write the c first, and then lift up your pencil and draw the straight line, whereas what I learnt in college is that you do not lift up the pencil when writing.

When my lil bro saw my playing the app, he said, 'eh like that one meh? I write another way.' He writes capital letter E with the vertical line down first, then the bottom horizontal line then the top horizontal line, and finally the middle horizontal line.

At first I thought, yer, your teachers didn't teach you one meh. But then i pondered..does it matter??

Does it matter which 'y' you use? The curvy one? Or the straight one? Is one wrong and the other right? At the end of the day, children are bound to see both in words around them.

Does it matter whether you lift up your pencil or not? Some teachers say its easier for children to learn when it's in two strokes. At the end of the day, when children begin to write, they will write faster and naturally they will stop lifting up the pencil, right?

If they do not catch the proper formation, so what? In the end, you will still be able to see the letter, right? And isn't that the purpose of writing?

Of course, I will teach the 'proper' way of writing letters, but sometimes, if they lift up their pencil and write the letter in two strokes, I just close one eye. I think the children have more important things to do.

Laws of a Teacher

Stop growing today,
Stop teaching tomorrow.

Teaching that impacts is not head to head,
But Heart to Heart.

Old thinking: Practice makes Perfect
New thinking: Well Guided Practice Makes Perfect

Old thinking: Experience is the best teacher
New thinking: Properly evaluated experience is the Best Teacher

Old thinking: We learn by Doing
New thinking: We learn by Doing the Right Things

Kid-spiration

Children are not just blank pieces of paper, but also painters: having the ability to learn & have plenty of ideas!

Creativity

In a school which I teach (Shall not mention which), I was required to write lesson plan for my arts & crafts lesson. I could not think of any objectives for my lesson. (Objectives have to start with "at the end of the lesson, children should be able to..." and the assessment has to be linked: "children are assessed on their ability to...") I was at a lost. My objective was to let them just explore and have fun! That's it!!

Then I was told, the objective of an arts and crafts lesson is to let children train their fine motor skills. Through pasting and painting. they train their fine motor skills. I agree that through arts and crafts, children develop their fine motor skills, but shouldn't the MAIN objective be focused on creativity? Do they need to be assessed on creativity?? Hello, children are waaaaaaay more creative than you, and it is these kind of highly structured close ended "ART" that we prepare that is squashing their creativity.

http://www.janetlansbury.com/2010/04/a-childs-creativity-how-i-learned-to-shut-up/

Learn to shut up, adults.

Just venting.

P/S: I have a huge stack of blank paper in class for children to JUST DRAW ANYTHING. They draw little lines and circles and can tell me what they've drawn. I label their artwork. And they love it! :)

A Bit More Settled

My boyfriend/fiance won't be happy to read this (jealous):

I've fallen in love with 16 lil people :-)

I've been so busy this past 2 months with training, lesson planning, observation reports, theme boards, preparation of materials... And now that I am a bit more settled at work, I am starting to plan my wedding! (I consider wedding planning my new hobby haha)

Proof of my busy-ness: I've only ready 1 book so far. ONE! UNO! (Last year I read more than 30 books) It was a great book: Bringing Up Bébé. It's about how French parenting differs from American parenting. 

I shall try to write about it when I have time, but for now, I've got some lessons to plan! 

Direct teaching? Or letting children explore?

MIT professor Laura Schulz, her graduate student Elizabeth Bonawitz, and their colleagues looked at how 4-year-olds learned about a new toy with four tubes. Each tube could do something interesting: If you pulled on one tube it squeaked, if you looked inside another tube you found a hidden mirror, and so on.

For one group of children, the experimenter said: "I just found this toy!" As she brought out the toy, she pulled the first tube, as if by accident, and it squeaked. She acted surprised ("Huh! Did you see that? Let me try to do that!") and pulled the tube again to make it squeak a second time.

With the other children, the experimenter acted more like a teacher. She said, "I'm going to show you how my toy works. Watch this!" and deliberately made the tube squeak. Then she left both groups of children alone to play with the toy.

All of the children pulled the first tube to make it squeak. The question was whether they would also learn about the other things the toy could do. The children from the first group played with the toy longer and discovered more of its "hidden" features than those in the second group. In other words, direct instruction made the children less curious and less likely to discover new information.

extracted from http://www.slate.com/articles/double_x/doublex/2011/03/why_preschool_shouldnt_be_like_school.html