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.