Young and modern at heart...

Sometimes my cooperative teacher picks up a lesson that involves an artistic creation, like the periodic table project where one of the outcomes was to create a drawing related to an assigned element of the periodic table.

I also asked my students to make a creative project for the “Día de los Muertos” (with the intention to bring together science and a cultural tradition, trough an artistic project) where they put together on a piece of construction paper the picture of a famous scientist with his short biography and they decorated their work accordingly to the Mexican tradition.

But besides those projects, creativity doesn’t come very often to my classroom. Me as a teacher, I try to present my lessons in creative ways.

Problem solving and critical thinking are always on the top of my head. I love to promote those ideas and to teach my students to use their skills and resources to solve problems. I promote collaborative working, because I think that sometimes my students can be good teachers of their peers, so I learned that strategy and I am trying to apply it very often.

I try to apply the new technologies that what I have learned: I use prezi for my presentations, I created a blog for my classroom, I embed videos on my presentations. Unfortunately not all my students have Internet access, many of them don’t have smart phones that is why some of the technologies that are available to enhance the learning experience are unable for me at this time.

We teach students to be self-directed when we work on a project activity. For those kinds of lessons, the activities guide the student to cover the learning goals as they work independently. We are monitoring their knowledge to verify that the goals were achieved. And this kind of instruction allows us to teach small groups of students according to their specific needs.

For almost all of those projects the students work on small groups, the groups are always the same, students have already their assignments, they know their strengths and they work on what they know they are strong on that.

We incorporate strategies and activities to provide a balanced and comprehensive curriculum. We vary instructional strategies according to the purpose of the lesson. We motivate students and encourage their efforts.