Aunque los días son considerablemente más cortos que cuando llegamos, tanto al amanecer como al anochecer, la luz durante el día, cuando hace sol, es espectacular y, los árboles ya han perdido muchas hojas pero todavía se ven colores tan vivos como éstos
Period 1: English 4IB
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Today I attended Kate O'Neill's English class with 10th-grade students.
These students are reading Harper Lee's novel, To Kill a Mockingbird, like many of the other classes this level at school. They have chosen this novel for many reasons but one of them is the amount of racial problems taking place in North America right now; another reason, from the point of view of the English language, is the amount of vocabulary (including legal words they hear all the time) students can learn with it.
First of all, she checked that the students had done the homework: 2 words per student from the novel that they had to write down on a class document, together with a definition of the word. They will have to study this vocabulary for the 'Vocabulary Quiz' next week, where they will get 10 words and they will do the following: learn their correct spelling, define them, and use them in a sentence.
After that, they did a 10-minute comprehension test about chapter 16, which they had just finished reading. The answers had to be short, about 1 line long.
Next they did a group activity on idioms. It lasted a little over 6 minutes. Nobody in the class knew the meaning of all of them and Kate explained that was because they were expressions related to the time period and that was why they included vocabulary related to farming.
They started reading Chapter 17 aloud - apparently they had not done any reading aloud in class with this book so far. They will have to finish reading the chapter at home, that will be their homework.
Ms. O'Neill has a whiteboard and a printer in her classroom so, when she ran out of copies for her students, she just printed them there. Convenient, I thought.
Period 2: English 1 IB
In the English 1IB class with Madison Green, the students were reminded of the group projects and the individual reflections about them due next Monday.
Then they got extra time to finish the tests they had started yesterday. Some of them needed the whole period plus recess time. As they finished their tests, they got their Chrome books and started working on their IB Reflections.
IB Reflections: All IB students have to write 18 reflections per school year, 3 per some subjects at the end of each term: English / 2nd language , French or Spanish / Maths / Science / Geography and History / Art, which means one type of Art: Music, Drama, Drawing...
Mr. Katz prepared a prompt to help the students write this first English class reflection, which must be 200 words minimum. He suggested 2 paragraphs, one about the multiple conflicts presented in AMNSD and the way the characters reacted to them. In the second paragraph, he suggested that they should think about themselves in relation to the projects: how they had coped with it, the choices they had made, why, how he/she had behaved.
Period 4: English 5IM
I was at Kate O'Neill's class again. The students in this group are reading W. Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew. Today they read Act IV, Scene IV aloud. They find it tough - both the story and the language - and I see they have some difficulties reading aloud. The teacher needs to explain what the characters do and say all the time; they seem to be a very talkative and easily distracted group too (like all the Immersion groups I have observed - which makes me think "immersion" means average students)
At the end of the lesson, the teacher played two videos representing the scene they had just read, to make sure they did get the action in it; one of the videos was from the film with Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton and another one was Commedia Dell'Arte
I was at Kate O'Neill's class again. The students in this group are reading W. Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew. Today they read Act IV, Scene IV aloud. They find it tough - both the story and the language - and I see they have some difficulties reading aloud. The teacher needs to explain what the characters do and say all the time; they seem to be a very talkative and easily distracted group too (like all the Immersion groups I have observed - which makes me think "immersion" means average students) |
| Charging his cell phone in the classroom like a pro |
Period 5: English 3IM
This group was revising for their test on `Monster´ tomorrow. They did an activity on Socrative and I think I had not seen them so attentive before. They were really focused on what they were doing, on asking each other about the story - on knowing who had finished first, too.
Ayer comenté que no existen tutores; al parecer en otros colegios hay `homeroom teachers´: profesorado al que se le asigna un grupo; en el caso de St. Thomas H.S se le asigna el grupo que el profesor/a haya tenido en la primera hora del día 1. Se supone que se encarga de organizar eventos especiales, recoger el dinero de ciertas actividades que la clase lleve a cabo... A principio de curso, es el encargado de ayudar a sus estudiantes a conocer el colegio, entregar los libros...
Today some students left a box in each classroom to collect non-perishable food for Halloween, as part of the community service of the IB students; the homeroom teacher is responsible for the box.
Servicio de correos: la primera foto es un buzón cerrado y la segunda es una foto de un cartero repartiendo el correo en los buzones de un edificio (en la calle, no en el portal)
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