Createch-ing

This year the CBE created an Office 365 environment for all the teachers and students. Different applications started to be available during the year: OneDrive, Sway and OneNote amongst others. As a Surface user, I already knew and used OneNote for personal purposes and soon I started to play around with it and discovered a myriad of possibilities for my lessons. I started to use it and soon it became an essential in my class, especially since I do not have a textbook for Mathematics or Spanish. From all the technological tools that I have used in my career, this one has been the most transforming. These are the main 3 reasons why I love it: You can create a Class Notebook for each of your classes. In each class you have, by default, a "Teacher Only Section",  a " Collaboration " section and a "Content" area ( shared with the students in that classroom), and a Notebook for every student. Each student Section has already these sections "Ha

It's been exactly a year since my last post. To say that I have been very busy is an understatement, but I have great news that I need to share with everybody. Our Robotics Team , " Technar " ( team 12055 at FTC Alberta) got the Second Place last weekend in Edmonton in the Alberta-British Columbia competition.  The first place was for a BC team which virtually turns ours as the best team in Alberta. Yay! I couldn't be prouder and happier about this Team that has showed their talent, enthusiasm, commitment and teamwork throughout these months.  We started back in September with a group of 30 grade 8 and 9 students. We have been meeting on a weekly basis ( more than that in the last weeks) guided by Mr Wilson, Engineering and Robotics Teacher from Ernest Manning High School. Mr Wilson has participated in the competition before and has lots of experience so his help has been crucial for our team.  Our team had lots of fun in Edmonton. We had a great start g

If you teach math, this situation will likely be familiar to you. Students need to solve a problem but they refuse to show their work. I am on a mission to get them to solve problems AND show their work without making funny faces like you are giving them bitter syrup. It is being a tough mission, they do good for a couple days, but then they forget...Anyways, as part of the mission I am creating posters like this so that they see it the way I want to see it. I think I am not asking too much but...maybe by the end of the year? I hope so , this mission is turning out to be an odyssey for now. Pssst...it is in Spanish, but you can easily relate.

Esta mañana he presentado en las jornadas de orientación para los profesores visitantes de Alberta hoy en Telus Science Park, Calgary. Ya no estoy en el programa de PPVV pero continuo trabajando en una ISA y colaborando con Alberta Education de vez en cuando. Animo a los nuevos profesores!

Teaching Inquiry through a second language? Yes, we can! Very often, us , bilingual teachers, debate about the ease of teaching in an inquiry environment while teaching Spanish ( or any other language) at the same time. Well, it is not an easy one, but we can do it. Take a look at this slideshow !

Yesterday, Sra. Hernandez taught our class and Srta. Palma's class a recipe from El Salvador: "Pupusas" . We started by washing our hands properly, like Mrs. Larsen taught us, everybody came ready to be cooks. Mrs. Hernandez had all the ingredients ready when we came to the kitchen. First our students  measured using fractions ( 1/2 cup, 2/3 cups...) , after the dough was done, students split it in two parts and made two balls. They flattened the dough using a dish, after they put the filling inside. Finally, they covered the pupusa with the other layer and put it on the pan to toast. They were ready in a few minutes. While a group was cooking the other half were playing a fraction game in spanish.  The pupusas were so yummy! Everybody had so much fun while learnt more on practical use of fraction in our everyday life and learning a recipe from El Salvador. Thank you Sra Hernandez! PS Every student got a copy of the recipe in Spanish, please let me know if you try it

We are working this year around our inquiry question "How do stories connect the past with the present?" , our focus is to have a strong literacy base that allows us to connect all the core subjects and enhance reading comprehension. At the beginning of the year, we started reading the book "The Witches" , by Roald Dahl. I enjoyed reading this book aloud everyday, it allowed my drama side to happen in the class. We had lots of fun and now I have a group of students that have turned into Roald Dahl fans and are researching, reading and making power points about him ( still, three months after) . The plan was to connect art and Spanish with this story , and based on the chapter where the children disappear, we designed "Missing" signs that were displayed around the school hall. We worked the self-portrait technique following "that artist woman " blog guidelines. 1st.- We used a recycled paper as background , with white paint and a roll

This week we have been practicing robotics in Room 10.  We first brainstormed what do we use robots for in everyday life. We discovered that robots are often used for dangerous or difficult tasks for humans.  We then  decided our project : we will make a map of Alberta's  Natural Regions and we will make our robot tour around some landmarks in our province.  We did a couple of challenges to practice and refresh our memory before our expert, Richard Gaskell , came to our class. We also learned decimals in class because we are going to need them to program our robots. Estimation has also been a handy strategy to figure out the # of rotations needed. Today we were doing an advanced challenge. The students drew some letters with tape on the floor and the robots had to trace them. It was not easy, that is for sure, it involved decimals, angles moving backwards... but there was lots of determination and engagement and the results started to appear just in time. It was so

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

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.