Introducing... my class!!

I tried to upload this video last night, but the file was too big. My good neighbor Steve taught me how to compress the file to upload on here... so we're trying again.

My students were so excited when I said I wanted to make a quick video to send to my family :). I wrote the questions on the board for their "interviews" (name, age, where you're from, where you're moving, your favorite thing about 4th grade), and then they read and answered the questions during their 15 seconds of fame :). Enjoy!!!

check it out!

Here's my neighbors', Steve & Diane, blog! Thought you might like to know who I'm living by :).

falling out of bed and loving my students

alright, so I fell out of bed last night... Don't worry, it's only 18 inches to the floor from my mattress!! Go to my roommate, Tricia's, blog here for details... ha, Trish is a great story teller.

I was nervous again this morning, but as soon as my students walked through the door, I was on the ball again. I really do have such a great class. Even the couple students that challenge my authority are great (One of these students is so intelligent that he just gets bored with the pace of the rest of the class and he begins to find other mischevious things to do! My work will be to keep him busy!!).

BRAG MOMENT. :) My students are seriously awesome. Last week, we gained an extra minute of recess by being the quickest and quietest to line up after recess (I told them before we went to the gym that we had to show up the 3rd and 5th grade students... It worked!). The Chapel Director also gave homework on Friday for the 4th and 5th graders to write down what happened during the first 7 days of creation. MY students :) remembered (mostly because I wrote it on our assignment board and explained a simple format to get them started) and had their 7 days written out for Chapel today. Ha, we totally showed up the 5th graders again. I went into Miss V.'s classroom (the 5th grade teacher) after school today, and she had "7 Days of Creation" written on her assignment board. She said her students were really motivated after the younger students knew more answers than they did. Glad my students can inspire others to do their homework :).

My discipline system is using a "3 Strikes" philosophy. The first strike is a warning, and the third strike is a parent note or phone call. Today, the students brainstormed possibilities for the second strike's consequence, and they had suggestions like "Extra Homework!" "No Recess!" "Pushups!!" (When "pushups" were mentioned, 4 of my 5 boys dropped to the ground in a pushup contest! I laughed and brought it to a stop...) I knew the extra homework consequence would result in lots of extra work for me, so I vetoed that idea. What they finally came up with is hysterical to me. If they have two strikes, then they miss the first 5 minutes of recess, BUT THAT'S NOT ALL!! One girl was concerned that if she missed recess, she would miss her exercise time for the day. (Ha! Cracks me up that she thought of that!!) So after missing 5 minutes of "exercise time", the boys have to give me 20 pushups and the girls have to give me 25 jumping jacks. (The girls were concerned that they couldn't do very many pushups, but the boys thought the girls doing 20 jumping jacks wasn't even to their 20 pushups, so the compromise ended up being 2o pushups/25 jumping jacks.) Oh my goodness, it was such an animated discussion and I loved every minute of it!

Needless to say, one student already missed 5 minutes of recess AND gave me 20 pushups. Ha, I look like a drill sergeant at recess.

Not only do I let the students choose their consequences, I also gave all the school subjects new names. Math is now "Puzzles"; Science is now "Exploration"; History is now "True Stories"; Spelling and Penmanship are now "Word Play". I also let the students pick their class jobs because I figure they will get to choose their jobs in real life, so why not in the classroom??

I think I do this teaching thing really differently from others, but my kids are eating it up!

Fun in the Sun

It's been a couple days... Sorry to those of you who have been checking everyday and anticipating a new blog!

I came home exhausted on Friday night and slept for a long time. I felt much better on Saturday.

We went to the feria again! I spent about $7 on a zucchini, a cucumber, lettuce, a carrot, cheese, and 2 potted plants. Awesome deals! Here's all of our loot after we washed it...

yum!!
Kim V. (5th grade teacher) waiting for us again... She's so patient when she is waiting for us to be ready to go ...

Then Tricia, Kim, and I headed into the city with our neighbor Diane, another teacher Kim V., and two new ILE students, Sunshine and Becky. Gringas in San Jose make quite the spectacle. We make a spectable when it's just one of us at a time, let alone 7 of us! We visited Mercado Central, Cafe Latino, Mercado Democracia, American Ropa (ha, a secondhand store from brand name stores in the U.S. -- they don't know that their "charitable donations" to foreign countries are being bought by Americans!), and Museo Nacional. Whew, quite the excursion! All that for a 175 colones bus fare one way... making it about 80 cents both ways. My kind of travel :)

Diane at Cafe Latino.

The gringas making a spectable...
ha, Tricia with a big fat woman statue. I think the story is that she will bring you good luck if you touch her. The statue, that is, not Tricia! :)
A cool window at Cafe Latino. :)

A small victory in speaking Spanish: I struck up a conversation with a vendor at Mercado Democracia, and Sunshine was looking at her purses. I was able to translate for Sunshine about the costs and colors of the purses. The vendor and I talked about how easily we forget words in the other language (she in English and I in Spanish), so we bonded over our forgetful minds.

Then, the supermarket again. I felt so much more comfortable asking questions about where to find items. Yay! Another victory...

Church is extremely humbling. My notes are a jumble of Spanish words that I hear and understand, but I can't make out the message yet. Oh well, that will come. For now I focus on what I do understand, no matter how little it is. I wrote 2 pages front and back of random Spanish words I understood. The pastor said "Perfectamente posible!" a lot, so I wrote that at least five times. ha.

Today after church we journeyed a whole 4 blocks to Kim's house. (It's so confusing with so many Kims. This Kim lives with a tico family and is the 5th grade teacher at Sojourn. She's in some of the photos from the trip to San Jose as well.) Her family was gone for the day and had told Kim to have some friends over. We ate lunch and then took advantage of their back yard and sat out in our swimsuits :). We also painted our toenails and had great conversation. Wonderful relaxation time for hard-working teachers, trust me!
the back view of the house.
Our beautiful toenails!

Oh, and Kim V. has a pet rooster in her back yard that was cockadoodling all afternoon. Strange but true.

check it out!

http://picasaweb.google.com/Tialrreilly/MKAndTeacherOrientationAugust2008

Check this link for photos from the meetings on Monday and Tuesday. Principal Reilly likes to take pictures of everything!!

First Official Day of Being a Teacher!

The gringas first day officially teaching in Costa Rica!! Kim (1st grade student teacher), Kate (4th grade all the way!!), and Tricia (Special Ed. and Kindergarten and Basketball Coach... that's the latest title anyway)

Alright, so this morning before the students arrived, I seriously was ready to puke. My mind was going a bajillion miles a second and I was absolutely sure that I wasn't ready for this huge responsibility.

Then the students arrived and I was totally in my element. I was directing the students on where to go and what to do and how to do it. I knew all their names within the first 5 minutes (I had a head start of meeting most of them in May!), except the twins, whom I kept mixing up all day. (I didn't know I had twins... Another teacher mentioned she thought they were cousins... Are they just pulling my leg?) We took a "classroom tour" with all the supplies and posters and then did a crazy five minute "student search" to mix up the new students with the old. We filled out this map of the world with where we're all from... I'll have to take a photo of that, because it's amazing. My class is from all over the U.S. and Latin America! I love it!

Then I drew a map on the whiteboard like a football play illustrating our class bathroom procedure. Ha, I should have taken a photo of that, but I already erased the board! The boys were so into that explanation... I find it absolutely necessary to make connections to their world... and football is the way to do it here in Costa Rica.

I came up with my fastest Spanish sentence yet this morning! I was taking all my students to their MEP and Spanish classes, and all of them go to different teachers for this time... It's a leveled curriculum, so each Spanish teacher has a level. Anyway, it was madness in the hall because all the kids are flustered, wondering which class they go into, and one teacher came out into the hallway and asked "Donde esta su estudiante Bayley? Si, ello es su?" and I said "Si, Bayley es en mi clase, pero no aqui hoy." What?? Where did I learn to think and speak so quickly?? I hardly had time to celebrate my victory, though, as 7 more of my students were like, "Miss Siscoe, which room do we go in?"

I'm excited about this school year. Genuinely excited.

early teacher training

I started training for the educational field very early on. "Wow, Dad, this is a pencil holder?"