I’m excited about the work that my newcomers have been doing in English. After interviewing staff members in our school community, they created videos to introduce those people, and we sent those to all of the staff in our building. I’m still looking for another way to publish those. They learned how to interview, practicing both their speaking and listening skills, and they learned new technology as we used Adobe Spark to create the videos. I’m a firm believer that students need to be content creators, not just content consumers. They really impressed me with their dedication to the project.
We’ve now moved on to the second and final project in our Home & Community unit. In one lesson I had prepared hidden items to smell and feel as well as some sound files to listen to. All of them were designed to be reminders of home–like lots of horns honking in traffic, the feel of rice, or the smell of cilantro–and it was an activity that hit the mark as students were very active in sharing with each other their memories of home. Just as we started the year by sharing where we’re from: town, state, and country, I wanted to reemphasize that where we’re from isn’t just a place on a map. So we also watched part of Juan Delgado’s spoken word “I Am From” poem.
I gave them five slides to complete, one for each of the five senses and challenged them to put short phrases of home that fit into the categories. We had roosters crowing, water flooding into homes, stray dogs in the street, and so much more. While students were working, I noticed that one was on an unexpected Internet page, and it turns out he was utilizing a multilingual keyboard, so I asked to take this picture of him to capture for others how technology can be used to meet a student’s needs.
And when we had brainstormed, using our senses, all the places from I home, I challenged them over fall break to request pictures from home from their family and friends still there. This past Monday students began working on their Where I’m From posters, which we will hang in the school. They are once again learning new technology while using Canva to embed photos and text to capture the essence of where they’re from. In addition to hanging these in the school, we’ll be presenting them in class. (And it just dawned on me that these would be a lovely addition to the hallways when the art show occurs in the spring–I’ll need to make sure we have these up because I want to celebrate who they are and the work that has gone into making these.) I also noticed that as students started receiving pictures from family, there were lots of smiles and a desire to share these. I learned that one of my students marched and played the bass drum in the Independence Day parade in his town.
One student has completed his, and it’s everything I hoped for when I designed this unit. This student just moved here from Mexico this summer! I can’t wait for the rest of them to be finished so we can celebrate where they’re from.
One other outcome I wanted from my fellowship, and that was included in my application, was to be able to share with our social studies classes when they are studying Latin America and Mayan cultures. The 9th grade social studies teacher and I sat down on Monday to see how we could incorporate what I had learned and really interest students in these topics.
Next week, I’ll be spending 20 minutes at the beginning of every period in her classroom (with around 160 students total) presenting about my fellowship and the cultures that I learned about. We’re going to have some fruits common to Latin America like mangoes, papayas, and dragon fruit, and I bought a bag of coffee beans at our local coffee shops–they’re from Huehuetenango, Guatemala where I visited. We have many students in our school who have probably never tasted these fruits or touched actual coffee beans. Meanwhile, we have our new student in one of those classes who likely has and even worked in harvesting coffee where he lived in Guatemala.
I’ll also have all of the souvenirs I bought–lots of handmade items–as well as Guatemalan, Honduran, and Mexican currency. I already have a video of some Q’uiche speakers dressed in traditional huipiles, and I have reached out to other folks in Guatemala to get some short videos of people speaking two other indigenous languages. I’ll be sharing lots of pictures and talking about the different aspects of culture that are different from American culture.
Then the social studies teacher will be introducing their project, which will be to choose one aspect of the culture I’ve talked about (food, clothing, economy, etc.) as well as one Latin American country and to prepare a presentation for the class. We’re hoping that there will be at least one thing I share that will really spark their desire to learn more.
I couldn’t be more excited about the projects that students are working on and will start working on. My fellowship was an amazing experience, but being able to come back to the school and the community and have it impact so many people makes it so much more rewarding.
Next up: presentation to ELL teachers in our region; presentation to other teachers in our region interesting in applying for a fellowship, presentation to the Rotary Club, presentation to the Carroll County Development Corporation.