Pygmalion in the classroom - My experience

Hello dear teachers and parents!

How's everything going?!?! It seems like life never stops to surprise us these days. 

I haven't been posting over the last 3 months because classes here in Madrid have been interrupted and my primary source of inspiration has run dry.

However, do not think I've spent these last 100 days rubbing my belly! Of course not! Instead, I had lots to do and lots to learn, because I'm enrolled in a master’s degree about bilingualism and international curriculum that is keeping me very busy. One has to work hard if she wants to be an expert for real.

Right now, we are in a sort of a break between the first and the second term, so I tried to get distracted publishing a new e-book about my experience as a practitioner in a primary school here in Madrid.

Perhaps, you might think ‘ok, another bunch of unrealistic ideas that you can think of only if ae a student with a lot of free time’, but, let me say that it’s not my case. First of all because I was working while studying, which means no free time at all, and secondly because the story is about some techniques which can be used worldwide in order to increase your students outcomes without changing a comma of your lesson plans.

What happened is that high expectations, projected thanks to these techniques, made their job properly with my unmotivated and disruptive students, and in so doing increased their marks.

Would you like to know more? Here you go!

You can find my book on Amazon (every country) and, soon, on the other eBook platfoms. Stay tuned!

By the way, there is also a Spanish version of the book, on Amazon, iTunes, etc. which is called Pigmalión en el aula. Una experiencia real. You can read about it here.

I'm looking forward to reading your comments and suggestions!

Stay safe!

Jolly Phonics - Teach Your Cute Little Monsters to Read

Over the last 2 years I've been teaching some children who were finding learning to read difficult and they also made lots of mistakes when writing.  As a result, and despite their best efforts, their academic results weren't satisfying at all. When I started to help them, their self-esteem was non-existent; they showed no interest in learning English, and, since they had experienced failure so often, they didn't even try to write correctly anymore and, of course, they didn't like reading at all.

To try to solve the whole situation it occurred to me to use phonics: If my students had begun by learning to decode a word by identifying the sounds it's composed of, they would at least have had a tool to help them write that word correctly. Having said that, if they had learnt how to read a word correctly, they would have been able to recognize it even when someone else said it, which would have improved their learning ability overall.

It worked. After a few sessions of studying phonics they've started to do better in English tests, their self-esteem has 'risen from the ashes' and they have even started to enjoy reading.

But, what are phonics?

Each letter of the alphabet makes a sound. Also, different combinations of letters produce other sounds such as 'th', 'sh', 'oo' or 'ee' for example. Words are made by blending all these sounds together from left to right.

More details about phonics are available here

What I like about the theory behind phonics is the fact that children acquire a decoding tool they will be able to use at any time with any word. Phonics improve their reasoning skills which is exactly what we, as teachers, should look for: children who can think.

In order to delve a little bit deeper into this topic I took a course in June where I learnt about the Jolly Phonics method of teaching phonics.

I definitely recommend it to anyone, both teachers and parents, because the amount of English words that children have to learn has increased dramatically over the last 7 years. In addition to English as a subject, kids are now studying science, social studies, art and music in English, which means there are many, many words to read, remember and write correctly if they want to get high marks. Learning every single word by heart, as children are doing now, is exhausting and certainly doesn't improve their love for learning or reading.

This year I'm going to follow the Jolly Phonics method to teach my youngest students, who are 4, 5 and 6 years old. If you too wold like to know more about it I suggest you take a look at the Jolly Learning website first and then attend one of their courses. To do so, you can get in touch with Beki, who, by the way, is a great trainer, her classes are dynamic and really entertaining, exactly as we like them at Miss Lucy's ;)

More about this topic here, here and here.

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