Week Six: Excellent Biffytoons week!

    This week we went bananas for Whole Brain Teaching's Biffytoons slides for the SuperSpeed 100 sight words.  Since school started, I've been showing the Biffytoon slides on my StarBoard - great huge big words and pictures - and we practice the actions.  This week I had the girls sit in front of the big screen every day and showed them the Biffytoons slides every day.  It was like watching a mini, audience-participation movie.

    In this picture, students use the StarBoard to practice the actions as one of their center activities.
    In each class I have a few very proficient girls, and I choose two of them to stand each side of the StarBoard and model the actions - prompting the other students.  I cue them all to read the words and give me the signs as we go through the slides.  If I do this at the end of class the girls are very enthusiastic because they are either going to lunch or going home when we finish the 'show'.  It's lots of fun, and they get a little rowdy and loud with their enthusiasm,
     I have also created interactive word lists for the first 40 SuperSpeed 100 words at a popular spelling website, so the students have opportunities at home to play games for review and practice of the words.

Week Five: SuperSpeed 100

To get the SuperSpeed 100 reading program up and running for my Arabic speaking students, I did a first twenty sight word baseline test and then started using the BiffyToons slides on the SmartBoard. The students have nowhere near enough English for me to explain or simply model the procedures for SuperSpeed 100, so my strategy is to get the whole class working on an easy assignment while I pull my strongest students in pairs and have them read with me modeling and supervising.  I make sure they are tracking left-to-right, completing accurate return-sweeps, taking turns saying the words, and helping each other when they get stuck.  Because they are not very fluent at the moment, I give them a little longer than a minute to read so that they get to the next level.

    I work with one pair of students at a time.  We read and celebrate their successes by filling out the new stars.  After the girls have colored their stars, each girl gets to act as teacher ('Abla') for another student while I continue with a new pair.  It gets a little chaotic at times, but the students love to be Abla for a little while and it gives them more practice with the words.  When students at the lowest levels have read with me or another student, they in turn, get to be Abla for a lower student.  This works great for a couple of my girls with strong personailites but limited word recognition.  They love the responsibility, and again, it's more practice for them.  When all members of the class are very familiar with the reading process and can use the materials to independently find their starting place on the page, I will be able to assign pairs and have all the students reading at the same time.

    As well as the fabulous BiffyToons slides which we look at and act out often, the girls now have their general back-to-school routines established at home, and many are receiving help from parents, nannies, or tutors.  Some of the girls have already made terrific jumps from the beginning of the year, and each week using the SuperSpeed 100 reading program demonstrates, and provides a record of, how much the students are improving.


 

Week Four: Making Connections

Whole Brain Teaching Strategies - what's working:  "Class? Yes?" continues to be the students favorite WBT strategy - they love the funny voices and we often add some gestures - making it a teeny-tiny brain-break work-out session.

      Rule Number Five: Keep your dear teacher happy is now their favorite rule.  When we rehearse this rule, we have facial expressions and gestures and add "...teacher happy, all happy....teacher sad, all sad."  (The great news about this is that we are learning to add and multiply and students need to understand "all" to calculate how-many-in "all").   
      Last week we read Lovely Lunch by Amanda Graham.  A great story with colorful illustrations - at the end of the story the biggest fish emerges to save the smaller fish from the hungry shark, and the smaller fish all dart away in a colorful blur of fish tails and one of my students excitedly pointed to the small fish exiting the picture and cried - "Rule Number One - DO IT QUICKLY!"  So, we had an exhuberant and spontaneous rehearsal of the rules to celebrate making connections to the story.
     

     We have been rehearsing "Mirror" gestures this week.  It has been great fun and the students love to watch and listen then repeat my gestures for vocabulary words.  Their favorite vocabulary word this week was 'tractor'.   When I vibrate my lips, bounce up and down and steer a pretend steering wheel, they think it is hilarious and "Mirror" enthusiastcally.   When I do quick vocabulary check-ups, they all know 'tractor'.
    Biffytoons is also working well.  Students use the gestures when I spot check them on their sight words, and I can actaully see some of  them thinking through the gestures and initial sounds of the words they are learning.   I'd like to spend more time with the slides and gestures.  We practice most days, and almost all the student have mastered the first few sight words.  This is a major accomplishment and has meant that I can start the SuperSpeed 100 program with all the students.  I use the Alphabet and Phonics SuperSpeed program for students who need that, but they still read the sight words posted on the doorway and during our Biffytoons review.

Whole Brain Teaching Strategies - challenges:
      I still have not been able to work out "Teach! Okay", but I'm hoping that our growing confidence with the "Mirror" strategy will lead into "Teach! Okay!"
      I lost myself with Power Pix which is a bit crazy because I know they will work so well.  I was previously sharing classroom wall space and bulletin boards with an Arabic Social Studies teacher, but she now has her own classroom, so I have some more space....and no excuse not to get relevant Power Pix organized, taught, and posted.
      Woops! I also lost "Mighty Oh, Yeah!" and "Mighty Groan" - mostly because
 they got to be a little frequent, raucus, and distracting and I need as few distractions as possible.  I will go back to this strategy and use the "silent party" approach with whisper voices - I think that should curb the distraction, but allow for their continued enthusiasm.  
 
 

Week Three - picking up the pace...

Big new school in the desert - this is one of the New School Model Cycle 1 schools built during the last few years in Abu Dhabi.  They are modern facilities with StarBoards in every room, computer and science labs, a full auditorium, and a swimming pool.  Ours has a separate wing for Kindergarden.  Previously in this town, the students went to single gender schools, but this new building has mirror image wings, separating, but serving, both boys and girls in the same building.

Whole Brain Teaching strategies update:

All five rules taught - hooray!
One of my dry erase boards now serves as "command central" for all things Whole Brain Teaching.  I have finally introduced and posted all the rules, and I have the students rehearse them as often as possible.  They love using different voices and showing me the gestures for the rules.  Apart from the well-practised and well-loved "Class-Yes?", their favourite routine right now is Rule Number Four:  Make Smart Choices.  When I taught this rule we spent lots of time with dramatic re-enactments of non-examples.  The students thought it was soooo funny when I acted out all their behaviours that did not qualify as smart-choices.  They are still very enthusiastic and eager to demonstrate all the behaviors that are NOT smart choices.

Power Pix modifications and "Mirror!"
As you can see in the photograph, at the bottom right hand corner of the bulletin board there are some of my hand made Power Pix.  These are great to have around because they help ME stay focused. And, although it's a little hit-or-miss at the moment, I have started to use them with the students.  I modify the Power Pix published on the Whole Brain Teaching website, making my own collection based on the curriculum set by the Abu Dhabi Education Council.  The Power Pix are particularly helpful because they provide essential visual cueing support for my L2 learners.
This week I also introduced the "Mirror!" strategy, which was an immediate and huge success.  These young Arabic speaking students are very reliant on multiple cues as they try to process information in their all-English classroom, and they really enjoy repeating what I'm saying and mirroring my gestures. The strategy has been particularly helpful in maths class where we are learning about multiplication, and we have gestures for "groups" and "all" which help us understand how to represent and count things.

These strategies have been a huge success so far, and I am looking forward to practising them over the next few weeks.  Unfortunately,  "Teach-Okay!" is eluding me at the moment, but I'm hoping that opportunities will present themselves and we will evolve into this strategy over the next few weeks.   Next week I plan on using more Biffytoons and getting the SuperSpeed 100 reading program up and running.

Second Week - Stay Seated!



 

How we get by.... speaking different languages and neither of us really understanding the other -

Because my students have varying levels of English ability, and I have even fewer Arabic skills, communicating and getting things done is a great and collaborative affair.  I have some students who pre-tested identifying only a few letters of the alphabet and a couple who read the first 20 sight words and beyond.  Some students speak very little English independently, only communicating their basic needs, while a few others understand more of what I'm talking about and act as translators.  (They suddenly pop up out of their seats, talking enthusiastically to the class, passing on the news or instructions that I have just shared, Charades style.) During all of this my students are constantly learning, and my teeny-tiny knowledge of classroom Arabic is improving - the students are always excited to help me in my attempts to learn or properly pronounce my new words correctly.  And so, the days pass by...

WBT School Week #2
I introduced a simplified Rule Number 3 - "Stay Seated!"  It took a few days for the students to learn how to say the two words correctly, and I suspect this will be the rule we will need to practice, practice, practice, all year long.  The students can be incredibly mobile, especially when they have finished their assignments.  Wherever I am, and whatever I am doing, they will jump up from their seats, come right over and push their papers in front of me (sometimes even into my face) repeating,  "Miss, finished...finished Miss....".  The (pictured) modified rule card featuring a model student helps me to address that behaviour with only the two words and a simple gesture.  My own professional challenge this year is to be clear (in my own mind and with them) about what needs to happen when their work is finished, and then to have the right activities easily available for them to use.

We are just two weeks into the school year, and I am still scaffolding Teach/Okay.  We practised a little more handling yellow and red counters, taking turns speaking.  And, as recommended in the WBT Instruction Manuals, I now have seating arrangements for the students so they can pair up easily on the mat as well as at their desks.

My biggest achievement at the moment is that I have finally completed reading pre-testing for both classes, organising students into pairs for SuperSpeed 100.  At the moment half of the students in each class will begin reading SuperSpeed Letters/Phonics, and the other half will begin at Level 1 of SuperSpeed 100.   How I'm going to pull this off in my classroom is still a bit of mystery.  But, how can I lack confidence with the Coach Biffle videos handy and all those WBT free downloads?





 



Whole Brain Teaching - first week - four strategies

A fabulous first week of Whole Brain Teaching

 

          This is my second year teaching in the United Arab Emirates as part of the Abu Dhabi Education Council (ADEC)s 10-Year Strategic Plan for school reform. The reform program aims to provide an international standard of bi-literate education in ADEC schools by improving the quality of teaching, improving the school environment, and making the program accessible for more children.
          I teach at a beautiful and newly built Cycle 1 (primary) school about 100 km away from Al Ain.  It is a very traditional community located near the border with Oman in the middle of the desert.  ADEC provides buses for the English Medium Teachers who are generally housed in Al Ain and commuting to this remote school location - my bus ride is about 1 hour each way.
          Last year was the first year boys and girls were educated in the same school building (different wings), and it was the first year that the boys had female teachers.  I think it was a culture shock for all of us at the school, and much of the year's work was focused on shaping appropriate school behaviours, procedures and social skills in the children.  Toward the middle of the year I began experimenting with WBT strategies in an attempt to calm some of the challenging behaviours and difficulties in my boys classroom.  They responded so well to the strategies that I decided to use WBT from day one this year.  

 

Now, the students have been back at school for one week.  I think the hard work of all the teachers last year has paid off, and my new 2nd grade students are quite amazing.  They are native Arabic speakers immersed daily in a two-hour block of English, Math and Science, and they are loving their first experiences with Whole Brain Teaching. 



I'm very excited that the students have learnt "Class? Yes!", "Hands and Eyes", "Rule Number One", and "Rule Number Two".  Based on my experiences using pieces of WBT before summer break, I chose to modify the language for some of the rules, so they look like this:
 



Modified Rules







Rule Number 1: Do it quickly! (same gestures)

Rule Number 2: Bubble! (make the two with fingers,
then fingers on cheeks and put a bubble in your mouth)

 

What I'm most excited about this year, however, is trying to implement "Teach! Okay!", which is a complicated thing for these young students who have widely varying levels of English and are new to Western teaching styles.  My first goal is simply to get them to turn to each other and speak to each other in English.  I started this week, by giving the students red or yellow counters to hold - to make their roles more concrete -and we began by playing a version of "Simon Says..." with children following instructions for either reds or yellows.  It will take some time, but I think that using "Teach! Okay!" in the ELL classroom has phenomenal possibilities. 

For more information about the school reform program in the United Arab Emirates:

http://www.adec.ac.ae/English/Pages/Schools.aspx







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