Createch-ing

Bienvenidos a todos los profesores españoles que acaban de llegar a Alberta. Espero que tengáis una buena experiencia! Jornada de Bienvenida para los 48 profesores visitantes de Alberta, Canadá pic.twitter.com/r5N8juTd8d — Melissa Valdes (@melissavaldesv) September 29, 2014

My class  has been designing a Minecraft town garbage detector robot. The presentation will be on May 5th. I will be showing pictures of their creations.

We have finished our unit about India this week with an iPad activity.  After studying about India and its quality of life and guided by Srta.Palma, students created this beautiful hand art. It turned out much nicer than I thought initially, given the difficulty of the art.  I like to use iPads at the end of a learning unit as a recap or reflection of what they have been learning. In this case, we put everything together using the app "Popplet" that functions like a mind map. It is very easy to use, students just tap the screen twice to add a "popplet" ( box) and then write, draw or add a picture inside.  I introduced the terms "fact" and "opinion" to summarize the information they learnt about India and add their thoughts too. They wrote five or six sentences that had different facts and their opinions about India . Then they put it all together in a Popplet.  As a visual learner, I love this mind maps to summarize a learning un...

This is the link to the news on Calgary Herald...check it out! Spanish program struggles with demand

We have been doing multiplication for the last few weeks. One of the art projects was related to one of the multiplication strategies: using an array. Students had to design an "Array City" ( Ciudad de matrices in Spanish) designing buildings that had different number of rows of windows. They had to be able to express that with a multiplication equation . They first did a draft on their journals. Then they transferred that to an acetate page using a sharpie. The "windows" have to be big enough to be able to color in with a pastel crayon. Then they colored it using pastels . We finally glued it to a black piece of cardboard. After the art was done, I wanted them to work on the language component of it. We used the iPad app  'thinglink "  to label the pictures with the descriptions , both written and orally in Spanish. They posted them on their kidblog page. This is one example: I really like how thinglink provides a whole different level of c...

Yesterday, the CCTCA 2014 concluded with a stellar keynote, Chris Hadfield. I had a wonderful experience this year at all levels, with my presentation on "iPads for Bilingual Education" and also with all the workshops that I went to.  I got to meet people that were my colleagues online and see partner teachers that I hadn't seen for a long time. I had a great time diving into the books at the exhibitors place. I found some interesting books for Spanish bilingual program( there were not many though).  But I have to say that this was an emotional conference , there were tears, hugs , laughter....I feel overwhelmed by the response of the teachers to my presentation. I hope they did not ended up saturated with apps and projects. The presentation and agenda of the session are shared in the CCTCA webpage for future reference. I would love to hear from them if they put into practice some of the ideas or come up with new ones. I had a great audience and I am thankful for the...

We have used PicCollage quite a lot lately to do vocabulary recap both in Science and Spanish . We have been studying different verbs in Spanish ( only in the present tense) and it was time to remember all of them. So I asked my grade 3/4s to create a poster with pictures that illustrated these verbs together with a sentence that explained that verb.  I really like PicCollage to do remembering activities. They are not one of the most complex and creative projects that we can do, but students still need to recall and reuse information over and over again in different ways. Also , it helps those students that have a more visual memory.