Month: March 2012

Year of Personal Discovery

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Back again – at last! This year my school has a theme for the year of “Believe You Can Achieve”, tying in with the Year of Personal Discovery. I am certainly lining up the opportunities for myself, aside from the obvious part of being in Hong Kong: this semester I am enrolled in a 9-week ESL/EAL course, tackling the Level 1 ActivInspire online course, and  yoga, and am going to be a relief teacher for the English Language Saturday School next term. We only have 9 days left of Term 1, and I’m not quite sure where the first 7 weeks went…

 

Other points of discovery this term have included how to ask Wikipedia to unblock our school’s open proxy so that Year 6 can add carefully researched information to specific articles, and how to export a ppt file into a wmv and embed it into a page on our Moodle-based Online Learning Platform to provide a tutorial on completing the Online Reading Record for the NSW Premier’s Reading Challenge.

The Other Side

I am also making time to read more – spending as many lunchtimes as I can with my nose in a book, sitting somewhere in the middle of the Library so as to be available and obviously aware of what everyone is doing. The last book I finished was Wonderstruck by Brian Selznick, another breathtaking blend of text and illustration brought together in a marvellous piece of storytelling. I deeply enjoyed his first book, The Invention of Hugo Cabret, and pounced on this new title excitedly when it arrived. One thing I found particularly interesting was that switching between text and illustration seemed to actually slow me down – I ended up savouring the story at a more leisurely pace, examining the pictures for details to provide the visual equivalent of adjectives and adverbs.
Image courtesy of ShuttrKing|KT on Flickr “The Other Side” Used under CC licence.

Where to begin?

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It’s been quite a while since last I posted to this blog, which is not to say that I haven’t had anything worth sharing – simply haven’t made the time to log in and begin!

Working in an International School continues to have its challenges but also rewards. Simply listening to the students and cruising through the fiction collection is introducing me to new authors and stories I might never have come across in Australia. I am also looking to reacquaint myself with classics of children’s literature, discovering along the way that many of these books ‘hit the spot’ for children who, due to their expat life and friends, are willing to explore more widely. I even found out that my Year 3 students had never heard of The Day My Bum Went Psycho by Andy Griffiths! We are currently remedying that situation… Some of the terminology has to be explained (that was the first time I had ever needed to explain the term ‘mooning’ to a child) but that hasn’t stopped them from enjoying it – one boy was literally rolling on the floor with laughter! A struggling reader, I am sure that this is one book he will be aiming to read for himself, and may perhaps be a powerful motivator for other disinterested children too.