Peace Day and EVAC

The past few days have been super eventful and wonderful (for the most part). I'm going to just complain for a few sentences, then all the wonderfulness will come in. OUR RUNNING WATER HASN'T BEEN WORKING CONSISTENTLY ALL WEEK!! That means, no showers, flushing toilets, doing laundry, washing dishes, aka gross. The water has been on and off all week. What is also miserable is that when we do have water, I have no hot water because there is a giant rusted hole in the bottom of my water heater so all the water just pours out the bottom instead of getting hot and going into my house. Marcelo is in Miami at a conference, hopefully when he gets back all this will be sorted out.

Now that that's out of my system, Thursday was international Peace Day. We celebrated as a school by having everyone wear white and taking a giant picture in the shape of a peace sign outside. We lined up on some chalked out lines and J went up the water tower to take this awesome pictures:

For most of the morning kindergarten took their time creating drawings and sentences to finish "To celebrate international peace day I am going to..." What they came up with was very cute. We glued them on a giant piece of white paper, put our handprints, signed our names and stuck the whole thing up behind the stage area. As the day went on all the other grades added their peace day projects and by the end it looked awesome with everyones work. 

Kindergarten Peace Day Picture I

Kindergarten Peace Day Picture II

Working on our group project

haha peace Kenvi

Peace Arya and Carol

Dominick working hard

Kindergarten Peace Day Picture III

For international peace day Marian is going to "sher mi dog wet Carol" aka Share my ddog with Carol.

Marcel is going to "pla soprheros wif Hakim" aka play superheroes with Hakim.

I don't have a picture of the wall with everyone's work, but this is kindergarten, pre-k 4 and first grade.

The past few days have also been wonderful because Friday and today I was at the EVAC (Eastern Venezuela Athletic Conference) Teacher's Conference. It was great to meet some other international teachers working in Venezuela and see the international school in Puerto. Yesterday I went to some great workshops. One was my a kindergarten teacher and how she uses STEM (science, technology, engineering, math) projects with her students and was really interesting and helpful and I'm looking forward to trying some cool new things with my kinders now. I was impressed that she found a way to use science journals with such young kids and I want to give it a try too. I also went to a section about service learning with projects with ANIA. This is about connecting children with their environment and giving them responsibility. Each child is given a plot of land that must have at least three plants (or three potted plants in a room). These plants are the child's responsibility and they take care of one for themselves, one for someone else, and one for the environment. These natural spaces that they create are called TiNis and the children learn to respect them and care for them so they paint signs and decorate these areas as well. The pictures that we were shown that kids were able to do were amazing and I think it really helps children, especially those living in a city, connect with and learn to care for their environment. Check out the website if you're curious to learn more, but it's in Spanish http://mundodeania.org/en Finally, I had also went to a conference about google apps. I never thought about using them, but I've found some pretty cool ones and I really like that these can be used on any type of laptop/tablet/etc not just apple products. I still have a bit of exploring to do in this area, but I think there will be lots of new apps I can use with my students.

Today was #edcampvenezuela and edcamp is an "unconference" where we decide what to talk about and get to choose where we go. It's hard to explain but pretty cool to see in action. The best thing I got out of today was learning how to use twitter in a classroom and for my out personal professional development. I had a twitter but never saw the point of using it, but I was shown so many cool things to follow that relate to my job and will give me good ideas to use in the classroom that now I'm going to be an avid twitter fan. We were also shown how to organize all the incoming tweets using an app so that it helps us filter what is important and relevant to our professional career instead of the "went out for drinks! omg #crazynight" stuff that usually comes up. I also loved that we were told that it was how some of the other schools kept in touch with parents when on field trips. Field trips are challenging to do here because of safety issues and parents are very worried. By using twitter the parents simply followed the school and would be updated every so often by a designated twitter teacher who would post updates and pictures showing that everything was okay and exactly what kids were doing at that moment. I also have now thought of creating a kindergarten twitter so that my kids can tweet what they're learning in class as they're learning it. Kindergarteners can't write anymore then the length of a tweet anyway, so it seems like a great way to get them writing, doing some personal self-reflection on their learning, and keeping their parents informed on daily classroom activities. 

Overall it has been a really great couple of days here and I've gotten to learn a lot!