Tie your dang shoes!

As a teacher, it's interesting what you have to teach that is not in the curriculum or any test, yet still very important for your student s to know and for your sanity.

Today I'm going to talk about shoe tying.

Here in Kuwait it is SHOCKING A) how many students can't tie their shoes and B) just how old some of these students are. They don't need to. The nanny does it for them. Following the lead from Austin, my awesome co-worker last year, one of the very first things I did with my students was have a lesson on tying shoes. I told them and sent a note home asking them to wear shoes that can tie and we actually watched a video, discussed and practiced tying shoes. It was even homework for them. for the first week.

It was fun to see just how excited and proud my students were to learn this. They are more independent because of it and they learned they can do things they thought they couldn't. We also talked about being open minded and trying new things because there is more than one way to tie your shoes. I know at least three.

So today, as my class was lined up for music and being the best class ever at walking and lining up for music- seriously, the best class at this and they are working hard to keep that reputation- the 4th grade class was coming out of the music room. I noticed a couple of 4th graders had their shoes untied so I told them they should tie their shoes. They bent over and began and after a second one of the students said, "Ms. I don't know how."

Now- I probably shouldn't have done this, but I turned to my class and said, "Would any of my 2nd graders like to show this 4th grader how to tie his shoe?" Hands shot up and I picked a boy in my class to help him. Some- most- of his class laughed at him, but it was in a playful not hurtful way. Really, he was laughing too and seemed to think it was funny as well. I don't think I scarred him... I hope I didn't.

Luckily, I happened to be teaching this 4th grade class later today. (long story about covering for other teachers we don't have time to go into here) I took time to talk to the class about how it is ok that he didn't know how to tie his shoes because he was never taught and was never told he needed to. We also took about 5 mins of class to have a shoe tying lesson. He was NOT the only one in the class that did not know how, and after this morning they were eager to learn. They actually really liked it.

We also talked about the different ways to tie your shoe and I gave the class a homework assignment. They need to go home and do a YouTube search on how to tie your shoe and they need to practice. The next time they see me after music class they need to know how to tie their shoes. If they already know how to tie their shoes then they need to learn a new way to tie their shoes.

We'll see how it goes next week. :)

Here's the new way I just learned by watching YouTube.... I'm up to 4 ways to tie my shoe!

Wandering around the desert at night

In an effort to enjoy time here in Kuwait more and to get some of the rust off my photo skills, I have started a photo club for staff at my school. We decided the first thing we would do with our club is some night time photography. I never really did night time painting with light or steel wool kind of photography when I was studying photojournalism so I've been having fun playing around with it.

We have our Eid holiday right now so we figured this would be a good time since we don't have to get up early for school. Since I haven't been randomly driving around the desert- at night or during the day- I wasn't really sure where to go. Some of the photogs had gone with the Q8 expat photography group to shoot the Milky Way a couple weeks ago and sent us that location. I also knew there were some interesting graffitied cement walls on the drive up to the ridge so we thought we would try that area. It's basically on the opposite side of town so it took us about an hour to get there.

The place with the graffitied wall was cool, but there was a fair amount of traffic headed up that road- for being out in the middle of nowhere. It seemed like some kids were having a kegger- or some kind of party out there. One of the trucks stopped and offered us some coffee. Anne was getting nervous with all that and wanted to leave so we hopped back in the car and decided to just drive further and see what we could find.

We drove for some time without really any options of side roads to take into the desert until finally we came to one that was near an oil field. As we started down that road there were bright lights and we thought it might be a security check point for the oil field. When we got up to it, it turned out to be a convenience  store in a trailer. Clearly the people that were running it lived there behind the store. Also, there was a cage full of pigeons.

We asked if we could take pictures and they said we could. (We all bought some drinks and snacks too) We tried to ask about the pigeons- what are they for? are you going to eat them? Then a car started coming toward the store. This was in the middle of nowhere and there were not really any cars so this caught our attention. As the car pulled in Anne said, "Is that a falcon?" Sure enough, there was a falcon riding in the car. A man got out and we all basically swarmed him and asked if we could take pictures of the falcon- which he let us. Then we realized what the pigeons were for. (collective ooooohhhhh) He was buying food for his falcon.

After that stop we headed further up the road into the oil field where we found a tractor and decided to play around with that taking light painting photos. The only camera we had that was *working wasn't a SLR camera and the longest exposure we could get from it was an 8 second exposure. It was kinda hard to work with such a short time, so pretty much all of us worked together and we got some fun shots. *I think I forgot to mention that my camera refused to recognize my memory card and Joanna's camera ran out of battery. We were running on cell phones and Kevin's camera.

Since my camera and Joanna's camera were not working we decided to head out again the next night. I really wanted to get a steel wool shot because I had never done it before. We hadn't tried the night before because we didn't think we would have a long enough exposure time, but it turns out we could have. This time we decided to drive south of town and see what we could find to shoot in the desert that direction.

Basically, nothing. This only served as a lesson to us that we should NOT go south of town to shoot in the desert. We eventually found a place to just pull over and take some steel wool pics, but we didn't find anything cool and there was A LOT of traffic out that way. We pretty much just drove around Kuwait for 4+ hours and I now feel like I've almost covered this whole country. The second night was not as fun.

Anyways, overall it was fun to get out and explore a little bit and play with nighttime photography. Next time I'm going to the ridge. :)

The graffitied wall. I think there's more we can do here- need to go back. 

The totally random bakala/trailer store in the middle of nowhere. 

Decent selection for a bakala. (*a bakala is a convenience store)

Kevin shooting the pigeons.

Falcon riding shot gun.  

Getting some falcon food. 

Showing off his falcon without the hood on his head. 

This was a workout for Joanna and Wayne.
They had to make those circles with flashlights in less than 8 seconds.
They literally had to sprint through it. 

We had 4 different people lighting different parts of the tractor.
Anne said it looks like a picture for a magazine selling tractors. :) 

Camel sign-- this was from the second night. 

Steel wool photography.
Basically you pull the wool apart and put it in a wire whisk, light it on fire and then spin it around. 

We had the whisk attached to a leash and I made Kevin wear a protective hoodie.

Welcome back to school round 2: week 0

I made it through the first week of school- yea!!!

Actually, the first week of school was pretty much great. A LOT of things I planned to do went totally according to plan. Teacher friends know- that almost never happens. My students are MUCH better at listening and following directions-- they're even kinda quiet. I LOVE it! (pause to knock on wood) PLEASE let them stay like this the whole year! I feel like I earned it after last year.

My school has a lot of things I like about it as a teacher. We have pretty good professional development where they actually module how they want us to teach in our classes. We had PD sprinkled throughout the week before the students came and I pulled a number of ideas from there. Our school gives us A LOT of freedom to teach how we want to in our classes. We don't have textbooks and our curriculum is kinda loose, meaning we can fit it in wherever we think it fits in. We do have a scope and sequence laid out to guide us, but we are welcome to flow with the student's inquiry. Also, we're not expected to teach any curriculum the first week. We are encouraged to spend the whole first week on procedures and setting up our class community. I think any teacher would tell you just how vital this is to a successful class the whole year. I would also like to say please don't think that makes it ok for your child to miss the first week. I think they miss out on A LOT if they miss out the first week. I had 3 students not come the first week- 2 of them came on Thursday, the last day of the week. (One of the mom's told me she was sorry but it was "impossible" for him to be there before Thursday. I'm sorry, was he not allowed in the country even though he's Kuwaiti? I don't think it was "impossible" as much as inconvenient to their summer plans. Whatever.)

In an IB classroom we don't do a lot of decorations on the walls. There are some IB posters we have to have on the walls, but mostly they are supposed to be empty and then filled with student work. I did however put this on my door. My friend Brooke- a teacher here last year- tagged our team in a Facebook post with a picture of a door like this, so I did it.

I pushed my comfort level a little bit this year. I really like things to be organized just so and I kinda like to control things like that. This year, after one of our PDs, I decided to NOT set up the tables and chairs and let the students do that on the second day. It took me about a day of telling myself and others that I was doing it to fully wrap my head around the idea and actually come to like. The idea grew on me because it would be easier to do some of the get to know you games with this set up, it would allow the students to get to know the classroom and other students, they would feel ownership when they set it up, and they will have a better idea of who they want to sit by-- until I change their seats next week. ;) I set the class up with all the tables pushed to the walls, the carpet in the middle, and chairs all around it. Like this:

Set up for 1st day of school. The colored paper on the wall will be my word wall. 

Different angle-- you can see the IB posters we put up.
The yellow, white, and purple squares will have student work later one. 

The classroom stayed like this the whole first day and into the morning of the second day. On the second day I gave them the challenge to work together and set up the classroom. Some of them tried to draw it out on the white boards, some of them just started moving things, I think they talked about it a little bit on the carpet before they started- if I remember correctly. Setting up looked like this: 

In action. You can see some of them at the whiteboards drawing it out. 

The end result. They liked the carpet in the middle. Totally not how I would have set it up, but so far it seems to work. It's a little squishy in some areas, but still working. 

Other highlights from the week:
We took a tour of the school. I had the students come up with the places they thought were important to know- which was a good idea because they thought of places I wouldn't have that ARE important. I was going to let them lead the tour as well, but that would have taken FOREVER and I just didn't have time that day. This is the list of places we went:

In the late morning of the first day, I asked the students what questions they had- any questions. I wrote them all down and told them that some we would answer now and some would be answered later. After writing all the questions I asked if anyone already knew the answer to any of them. As students answered I crossed out the question and wrote the answer next to it. I elaborated if I needed to. As we did things throughout the week many of the questions were answered with our activites. We revisited the questions every day and I asked the students if they knew the answer to any more of the questions. They basically answered all the questions by the end of the week. It was kinda awesome. I didn't just sit there and answer questions, THEY answered all the questions. (happy teacher moment!)

Some questions/answers were erased by the Arabic teacher-- grrr!
My favorite questions: Why are we not working? and Will we have tables? 

Another very important thing we worked on was our classroom agreement, or essential agreement. I think many non-IB schools/classrooms are doing this, but basically the students come up with the agreement (rules) of the class. We did several activities leading up to this. We did and activity answering questions like "What is important to have in our classroom?" and "What do you want to do in the 2nd grade?" Building off those I had the students make goals for the year. I don't remember how I had them do it-- individually and then as groups or just individually. After they did that I took them, combined similar goals and wrote them all on chart paper:

The next day we reflected on our goals as a class. Then I had each student work with a partner and come up with 5 essential agreements (rules for the class) that would help us achieve these goals. After they did that I had them work in 3 groups of 6 students (we were missing a few students that day) and each group had to come up with 5 essential agreements. Then I put all the agreements each group came up with on the board. We combined similar ones and picked the most important ones. We ended up with 6 essential agreements for our class.

The ones with check marks were ones that multiple groups had. There were two others I erased because they were similar to the other ones but I can't remember what they were. 

This was THEIR verbiage- good job 1st grade teachers! I followed up to make sure they knew what it actually means. There were at least a few that knew what all of it meant and the rest of them learned what things like "open minded" mean. 

One other thing I did with them that was fun was a hashtag lesson. During our PD I read this blog (http://justwonderingblog.com/2012/09/24/said-no-true-inquiry-teacher-ever/) that was based around #whatnoteachersaidever. I decided that in discussing what we wanted our classroom and school year to look like this year, I might be able to use this same idea. We talked about what a hashtag is-- some students knew- and then I showed them a list of sentences I made like; I love noisy students. I don't want to take summer break! I like a messy classroom. I asked them what they thought the hashtag would be- they got the idea that it was opposite but they didn't get the hashtag so I told them it was #saidnoteacherever. I read the sentences with the hashtag after it. Then I let them come up with sentences for #saidnostudentever. They wrote them on sentence strips and I put them on my bulletin board in the hall.

Some highlight: I love a trashy school. I hope we don't learn anything. I don't need a teacher.
I hate caring. I don't want to play. I hope students don't help people. 

There were a few more things but that's pretty much the highlights and this is getting too long. :)
PLEASE let the rest of the year be as awesome as this week!!