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.