The fourth week (03/15 Monday - 03/19 Friday)

The fourth week was about Plan B!

I usually make lesson plans on weekend for the coming week, so that on Monday, I receive the approval from Mrs. Ross. Mrs. Ross wants me to place my lesson plans on her Ed-line. In this way the students who are absent can check what they have missed (although they have not fully utilized this Ed-line system :-(

Also according to Mrs. Ross, it is my protection and reasoning to leave no excuses for the students not to do the catch-up work. (great idea!)

Although I made lesson plans ahead of time, this week's experience was to have plan B and be FLEXIBLE because on Wednesday Mrs. Ross could not come to school, and she arranged the substitute teacher who extensively travelled around the world so that he could talk to the students about his experiences and inspired them. I knew that she would be absent, but I did not know that the sub teacher, Mr. D would take my teaching time to talk....

With his artifacts from south America displayed all over in the classroom, I decided to ask him to take over after a quick vocabulary review that I needed to do, and went on to the plan B which I believe, taking advantage the great opportunity of the guest speaker who happened to be the sub teacher for Mrs. Ross. His experiences in China to communicate with a Chinese doctor in Spanish had blown the students' mind. Stories of his Mexican wife who went to deep in Amazon in Bolivia and gift exchange with indigenous people were interesting. Usually students were very noisy but they were glued in his presentation. At first, Mr. D said I could do whatever I wanted including just carrying out my lesson plans and ignore him, but I am so glad I changed my plan A to plan B so that he could inspire the students. (However, that means I had to re-create the lesson plans for Thursday and Friday, and re-post on Ed-line. And I believe it worth the extra work!!)

Connection with Marzano

This week I used the Similarities and Differences (chapter 2) because Marzano says that they might be considered the "core " of all learning.

I did not want to just focus on language learning, and wanted them to know some hispanic culture. As the textbook suggests cultural connection with two Mexican artists, Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, on Friday I planned to do some cultural exploration in English.

At first on Monday I assigned the students to research about one of these two Mexican artists by Friday, so that the students will be prepared some knowledge of unfamiliar Mexican artists, Frida and Diego. I allowed them to write down in English, because my focus for this activity is not a language learning, rather deeper understanding of history and culture.

On Friday those students who did the homework had a chance to present the information they researched to the class (unfortunately many students on 6th mod did not do the homework, even though I gave them a reminder throughout the week). Then I went over some more information on powerpoint, about their biographies, about their art (surrealism), and stories behind the paintings.

Then we compare and contrast these artists in Venn Diagram with the group. I used the student-directed activity which I anticipated the many different ideas from each group. However, I needed to give them a specific theme on similarity and differences, so half of the class was focusing on the biography (which I on-purposely assigned to the groups with difficulty), and the other half groups was focusing on the similarities and differences of artworks (which I assigned to the higher performance groups). In this way I was able to differentiate a little bit depending upon the students' ability. While the students were working on as a group, I moved around and checked every student's participation as well as answering some students' questions.

At the end, each group had a chance to talk about their outcome in Venn Diagram while I write on Smartboard what they said in order to create one big Venn Diagram as a whole class in each category of biography and artworks of Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera.

Overall, the students were able to engage the activity, not just my boring lecture. Since I am going to have a vocabulary (Lesson 3B) quiz on Monday, I am going to add a question and ask them what they remembered about these two Mexican iconic artists.

What I liked about the activity of similarity and difference was 1) every student engaged in the activity, 2) I was able to differentiate depending upon the ability, and 3) they understood the class because performed in English, giving some struggling students a break from learning Spanish language (and I did receive more interested participation from these students.