Sunday, Oct. 5th is World Teacher´s Day! 
An Attitude of Gratitude!

This is a special day dedicated to remembering and honoring teachers around the world who have made a difference and are making a difference in our lives and the lives of students of all ages around the world!

Two years ago, with my 4th year English Specialist students in the primary and preschool teaching degree at  the University of Barcelona, we did a scrapbooking activity to say thank you to those  very special teachers in our lives who touched us in ways that  have helped us become the persons we are today.

I think it  was a  very positive activity which the student loved.  I am always looking for ways and means to  create a space for gratitude in our classroom and to model how language activities could do just that, so it occurred to me that discussing World Teacher´s Day would be a perfect opportunity to  bring gratitude to our class. We focused on  building language skills  through the structure: thank you for + noun/gerund, and shared our individual and collective memories of outstanding teachers who made a difference in our lives.

I  began the class by writing on the board  the expression "An Attitude of Gratitude" and asked the students to think about what this expression means to them.  We had a 5 minute round- the- room oral discussion where we shared our ideas and explored our personal  meanings of this phrase.

Then I  told them that UNESCO had designated Oct. 5th as the day of the year to remember and say thank you to the teachers we were so blessed to have,  and to think about how they touched us in very special ways.  I asked them to take a minute and try to remember those teachers and what they brought to their lives. In groups of 4 they shared these personal stories with each other for about 10 minutes.  I moved around the class and listened-in on the groups.

Following this, I presented the language structure, "thank you for + "  and asked the students how we could finish this expression. Together we reminded ourselves that this structure is always followed by a noun or a gerund.

Finally I asked them to design a page in their scrapbooks, calling it  "An Attitude of Gratitude"  where they would remember these teachers and write and/or draw what they were thankful for.  For homework, I asked the students to find out more information about World Teacher´s Day on the Internet and to add a link/tile they found interesting to their symbaloo.edu PLE (personal learning environment). At the beginning of the next class, we shared  our scrapbook pages and our links with each other (me included) and read out loud what we wanted to say thank you for!

Here are a few pictures of some of the student scrapbook pages:

I thought this was a very successful class because it allowed me to meet the 10  objectives which I have set for my myself and students:

1. to bring a value to the class (gratitude) and explore its importance in the language classroom
2. to build language awareness (the grammatical structure: thank you for+ noun/gerund)
3. to create opportunities for individual reflection through  narrative texts (oral, written and visual)
4. to create opportunities to model and build speaking, writing, reading and listening skills
5. to differentiate instruction in a way that is both  personalized and communicative at the same time
6. to provide an opportunity for students and myself to be creative
7. to model and allow students to participate in new ways of teaching and learning (the use of scrapbooks and the development of visual literacy skills)
8. to engage my students in a fun and enjoyable language learning/teaching session
9. to document and make visible what my students are studying and learning
10. to incorporate the internet and new technologies in the lesson through the use of the personal learning environment

I plan to do a similar activity this year. But this time I would like to also include a craft activity,  more student interaction with technology and the internet and dedicate some time to the analysis and correction of "Our  favorite errors"! More on that at a later date!

A Short Introductory Audio Presentation on Scrapbooking

A 7 minute Movie I Made of my APAC 2010 Presentation

I just came across this very rough 7 minute powerpoint presentation converted into a movie I made when I gave my first presentation at APAC, (The Association of English Teachers in Catalunya http://www.apac.es/ ) on the scrapbooking work I have been doing for the past 15 years with my students. I have given a second presentation this past Feb. 2013 which I will also post later this summer.

By the way, if you are an English teacher living in Catalunya, I highly recommend becoming a member and attending the annual ELT conference at the end of February in Barcelona. They do great stuff and organize one of the best ELT conferences in Spain!!!

If you are new to scrapbooking in the ELT classroom, you might want to see this short little movie.  If you enjoy it or find it useful, or if you have any question or would like more information, please don´t hesitate to leave a comment and I will get back to you!

Here is the video clip from my you tube channel as well:

Scrapbooking Presentation APAC 2010, Barcelona Spain

Happy scrapbooking,



Theresa

OECD educationtoday: Creativity in schools: what countries do (or could...

The importance of creating spaces and opportunities for the development of creativity was the focus of a recent OECD workshop on Education in Singapore.  The workshop highlighted the importance of making creativity an important part of our learning objectives and offered rubrics for corresponding assessment initiatives.  For the complete blog entry, visit  OECD educationtoday: Creativity in schools: what countries do (or could... (by Stéphan Vincent-Lancrin Senior Analyst and Project Leader, Directorate for Education).

Scrapbooking with students is an effective, student-centered way to create learning habits that reinforce creativity and the skills related to being creative.  In my next post, I´ll include examples of students´ scrapbooking activities that give importance to creative expression.

Scrapbook Survey

This is a short, 3- question survey for my university students at the University of Barcelona (Introduction to ELT Methodology). Take a minute to answer the questions. I will send you a report with the results of the survey and provide you with a special gift for participating. Be sure and send me an email telling me that you have participated in the survey, so that I can send you the special gift.
This is my email address: tezanatta@gmail.com

Create your free online surveys with SurveyMonkey, the world's leading questionnaire tool.

What scrapbook pages look like!

This past summer I offered two courses based on my scrapbooking experiences, one in Barcelona and one in Tarragona. The courses were about how to use scrapbooks in the preschool and primary English classrooms. Here are two photos of some of the scrapbook pages the teachers made with Pippa Miekle and Hannah Smokum during the course I developed.



During the course, we brainstormed and discussed classroom language we would like to use in English. This was our "Classroom Language" page in our scrapbooks!



During the course we made framers. Framers are wonderful, student-made, student-centered, learning tools that help students with literacy development. The day after we made the framers and experimented with many different ways of using them in the class, we made this "Who? What? Where? Why? and What? page to help us review what we remembered about framers!

Teachers in both courses were very happy with these pages and the scrapbooks they had made!

Scrapbooking began as a means of preserving personal and family history through the collection of stories, photos and memorabilia. It is thought to have begun in the 15th century after the invention of the printing press.

The first scrapbooks were called commonplace books or "commonplaces". These were essentially books which contained all kinds of collected information about a certain topic or theme. Following commonplaces came "friendship albums" . These albums appeared in the 16th century and were collections of signatures, quotes, stories and drawings by friends, personal acquaintances and patrons. Often they were created during trips and included the calling cards and descriptions of visits with people who were met along the way. Many includedlove letters or poems in them as well.

Mark Twain, the famous American author and publisher of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, created, published and sold the very first scrapbooks with pre-pasted pages. Mark Twain loved making and keeping scrapbooks! As an avid traveller and speaker, he filled his scrapbooks with souvenirs, memorabilia and articles from the places he visited. He often became annoyed with having to find glue, so he invented a way of "printing thin strips of glue" on paper. In 1872 he patented his "self-pasting" scrapbook and by 1901 there were more than 50 different kinds of scrapbooks available. All you had to do was add some water to the back of what you wanted to paste in the album and it ingeniously stuck to the pre-pasted page. See

www.pbs.org/marktwain/scrapbook/index

for an on-line interactive scrapbook produced by pbs that talks about Mark Twain´s life and his scrapbook invention.

Scrapbooks passed through another very important development stage with the invention of photography in the 19th century and the affordable availability of the Kodak Brownie camera at the beginning of the twentieth century. Now it was possible to include photos in the most personal of albums.

But it was the the World Conference in Record Keeping, in Utah in 1980, where modern scrapbooking was born! Marielen Christiansen, a speaker, brought and displayed 50 family scrapbooks that she had designed and created over the previous years. At that time, a new product called "sheet protectors" was available. Marielen inserted her family memory pages into these sheet protectors and then placed these sheets inside three ring binders.

She revolutionized the Fair. Based on the success of that presentation, she and her husband published a very helpful book called The Making of a Scrapbook. That was the official birth of the scrapbooking industry in the United States and the rebirth of a 5 century-long tradition of memory-making. Marielen and her husband AJ went on to create the company, Keeping Memories Alive. Following this, they launched the first scrapbooking catalogue and on line web-store.

Since then, scrapbooks and the making of scrapbooks have developed into a billion dollar industry around the world. If you search in Google you will find thousands of sites. The art and hobby of scrapbooking has recently arrived in Spain. You are now able to find materials, websites in Spanish and Catalan, and even stores where you can purchase materials and get lots of ideas on how to scrapbook!

If you would like to learn more about Marielen Christianson and her pioneering work with scrapbooks, see

www.scrapbooks.com/history.php