7 Tips for Celebrating Our Kids at the End of the School Year

The end of the school year is at the corner and to be honest, it has been quite a challenging year! This is why our students need to be celebrated more than ever. They have experienced the unthinkable and they have come out on top! 

Our students had to go from regular school days, attending school spending time with their friends and teammates, having regular face to face contact with every teacher and leaving on what for most was our most awaited spring break to never return. 

In a matter of nothing teachers needed to adapt their entire teaching practices to distance online teaching. And help students adapt to that environment as new norm.  We had to get used to seeing each other’s faces through a screen. Students had to log into a learning platform to look up their material and assignments. They had to contact their teachers and turn in their work electronically… AND THEY SUCCEEDED!!

Many of us find ourselves in the long stretches, at the end of this particular journey, and we need to celebrate it. For students, this can be in a variety of ways:

•         Certificates
•         Reward/Brag tags
•              Celebration Zoom Ceremonies
•              End of School Memory Books
•             Emails about students’ accomplishments
•             Send Post Cards Celebrating Our students
•            Dropping off End of School Year Goodie Bags

Some of these can be electronically assigned or emailed to students. Other things can be dropped off, since we can’t really meet yet. However, all of these are ways in which our students feel happy about the end of school year accomplishments. They have earned them!

Love,

Suhaily

  

The Virtual Teacher

The Virtual Teacher

I remember that one time I rode on the EPCOT’s Spaceship Earth and got to the future part where they have a teacher, teaching students from different places of the world through a screen, and I asked myself: “Man, will we ever get to that?” Little did I know that would be our current reality!

I myself have always been a “paper teacher”. I love having students manipulating objects in class and working on an accountability piece I can keep; something to evaluate and offer concrete feedback. I love centers and concrete objects. 

I am the type of person who loves the feel of a good book rather than downloading an electronic version, even though they are much more accessible. Still, the real concrete one gives me a sense of accomplishment. However, it has been my experience and it is my believe that education is evolutionary, it is in constant change, and us teacher have to evolve with it!

I would’ve never in a million years, believe that I would become a virtual teacher! Let alone to di it within a week!! Yes, one week!! Having never done anything remotely similar, I had to learn how do teacher over an online platform. I am sure many teachers can now relate! The entire world has had to learn to Zoom in order to stay in contact with one another! I had to learn how to navigate prepare lessons, upload materials and resources and guide students through the platform in order for our lessons to be engaging an effective! 

Yes1, the past several weeks in which we have become virtual teachers to our students have been tough! Still, it has been a huge learning process for both teachers and students. Through this experience, we have been able to stay in contact with our students either thorough applications such as Zoom, Google Meet, or many others use in collaboration with educational platforms such as google classroom, seesaw, canvas, Flipgrig, Edpuzzle, or others. 

We get to see them, to teach them, to guide them, to help them, to encourage them and we get to see them grow.

As for myself, I can’t wait to get back into my classroom, but unfortunately that will have to wait for now.   In the meantime, I will continue to learn new ways, new strategies, new applications,  and of course I will continue developing all sorts of wonderful ideas for this upcoming school year!!

Until next time, 

Love,

Encouraging and Reinforcing the Love of Reading to our Children.

Encouraging and Reinforcing the Love of Reading to our Children.

Would you believe me if I told you that I NEVER went to a library or a bookstore as a child? When I was little, taking a trip to the local library was not a thing! I did not even know if there was one anywhere near where I lived. My wonderful mom had the opportunity to stay home with me and she took it upon herself to begin my education. However, the only times in which we would go to actually buy books was during the ‘back to school’ time in the summer!

I remember loving going to the library store with her to get my books for the school year! However, besides textbooks, I didn’t have that experience of picking a book for leisure reading. I would see her reading at least an hour a day but I never really did it myself. 

I also saw my best friend reading for leisure constantly. To me, that was not normal! It wasn’t until I was an adult that I started vising bookstores, and to be honest the first book I loved was Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone! 

Then I became an elementary teacher and I discovered the world of picture books!!! And booooy do I love them!! Those are my favorite books! I love the colors, the pages, the stories!! As I teacher I would see the real benefit of taking kids to the library to pick books and noticing the difference when you have students who read constantly and those who unfortunately don’t. the difference is enormous!

So, the point of my life anecdote is that reading as a child and instilling that love for reading is so incredibly important!! Children’s minds are little sponges that want to learn ands process everything! They find themselves discovering the world through pages. 

Give your kids the gift of books and sit with them to discover that world together. Take them to the bookstore, over to the children’s section and let them pick books that pique their interest. If that is not possible, allow them to find books online! There are many website and applications that support the world of reading! Some of these may be vooks.com,  getepic.com, readingeggs.com, abcmouse.com, magicblox.com, read.gov, childrenslbrarylady.com among many others.

Encourage your children to read at least 20 minutes each day. This will allow your children to grow their vocabulary exponentially! Research says that a student who reads 20 minutes per day is exposed to over 1.8. million words in a year and can score approximately 90^th percentile on standardized tests. 

This gives them the opportunity to understand text, to develop fluency, to inquire, to establish relationships within the text, to compare, to contrast, to predict, to infer, to recall events, and many other cognitive abilities. 

The benefits of reading every day are endless. So, get your child immersed in the world of print, in the world of literature!

Love,

Suhaily