Teacher Extraordinaire - Portfolio of a Teacher and Lifelong Learner

Given that I am currently doing my Masters program, we are constantly in the process of learning, discussing and producing artifacts. The most recent course that I completed was PME 841 Critical Foundations of Literacy. For our final assignment we needed to produce a 9 slide assignment (barring the title page and resource page) outlining three different Literacy concepts, what they are, why they are important and then outlining one or more teaching strategies for each.  Since the school that I teach at is comprised almost entirely of students learning English as an Additional Language, and we frequently get students who are new to English in our classrooms, I thought I'd focus on the K-Grade 3 audience, and the audience of those teaching students who are new to English.  The first two concepts I looked at are related: "Phonological Awareness" and "Phonemic Awareness." My slides define Phonological Awareness, Phonemic Awareness and Phonics, so that practitioners ...

Last year I found out about an excellent program called Postcrossing . With Postcrossing, you sign up for an account and then can initially send up to 5 postcards. The addresses that you are given are random, and you must also write a code on the back of each postcard. Once the postcards arrive, they are registered by the person who receives them. After that your address goes into the random pool and you can receive a postcard from anyone doing the program, anywhere in the world. Students really enjoyed doing this last year, and it enabled us to learn a lot about the world around us, by finding connections with different places around the world. It made us all more global minded! Below is our Postcrossing board mid-year.

Often implementing change in schools can be difficult, but sometimes we need to be the leaders, find other like-minded people and help in making that change happen. We need to realize that change does not and should not happen overnight, and look towards long term sustainability. This is fueled by sharing the load, changes occurring laterally (from the top to the bottom to the top), creating new leaders within work situations, having time to collaborate, valuing all opinions and then following through with actually collaborating. Teachers having time to collaborate, having an atmosphere/work situation of respect and not overloading teachers is all essential in keeping up the energy and drive necessary to affect change. Changes should be based on innovation, research, patterns and changing trends. In other words deep knowledge in an ever changing world needs to be valued. It is only through these aspects and methods that we can hope to close the achievement gap. Of course teachi...

Every year when classes are writing description, they have an opportunity to bring a toy into school, take a picture of it and print it in ICT class. As my students are second graders, they are learning I.C.T skills with this project. Another use for taking pictures of their toy, might be taking pictures of two or more toys in different positions, printing off three different pictures and then writing their own "toy story" based on the sequence of pictures.

Currently I teach in Al Khor, Qatar. There is not a lot of English media that honours and educates about Qatari culture. As a result, I make a lot of material myself, which is used during Qatar National Week . Last year I made Reader's Theatre scripts. This year I wrote new lyrics to the song "Shoo Fly Don't Bother Me", entitling the song "Past Qatar Jobs". I have also created homework pages that support non-fiction learning about Qatar. It is very important that students feel that their origins, ethnicity and culture are honored, and sometimes creating new material is necessary to achieve this end. Below is Past Qatar Jobs , a song sung to the tune of Shoo Fly : Youtube karaoke track to go with it: The song performed at National Day had 6 verses in total, with three in Arabic and three in English. An mp3 was created in Garageband with the help of an ICT teacher at the school, that had a full 6 verses. Here are the Reader's Theatr...