A Digital Immigrant in a Digital Native's World

The Written Assignment Kindergarten is my world. Kinder es mi mundo . I have been an early childhood educator for eight years. I have learned, cried, taught, and loved. My students enter my classroom as babies and leave as children. My children are blank slates. They come from backgrounds unforeseen by most; they have difficulty in communicating as they were never taught how to talk and how to share. At school, we teach them in their home language and a new language; whether that be English and Spanish or Spanish and English . We are changing their lives; expanding their horizons; creating bilingual and bi-literate humans. We are their beginning. We set the foundation for their years to come. Without us, they fall between the cracks; their foundational skills are missing; they do not know anything about who they are. I don’t teach to teach. I teach to impact. To create. To explore. To laugh. Like Kelly Reed, I make the time to allow students to create. They are kindergar

Let Them Be Little

This I Believe… ·         Albert Einstein, “An Ideal Service to Our Fellow Man” ·         Brian Grazer, “Disrupting My Comfort Zone” ·         Jennie, “Knowing Where a Person Is From” My Core Beliefs About Learning and Teaching and How These Impact the World 1.      Teaching is a service. Teachers teach to make an impact, to change a life, to awaken learning in little humans that will last a lifetime. Teachers awaken a lifetime love of reading, exploring, and a desire to change the world. 2.      Learning happens in the risk zone. All individuals both big and small need to be kept in their risk zone (where challenges happen) in order to acquire learning. Being in a comfort zone is where an individual knows what they need and feels comfortable staying there. The danger zone is where an individual is too uncomfortable to learn, let alone do anything. Yet, the risk zone is just right. Comfort is there with a challenge to learn, a challenge to change, and a c

Beyond Pink and Blue: Fourth Graders get fired up about Pottery Barn’s gender stereotypes Robin Cooley Students were appalled by the Pottery Barn Kids catalog that they were receiving in their homes. After learning about stereotypes in their fourth-grade classroom, these students noticed that the Pottery Barn catalog was biased towards gender stereotypes of pink and blue. All girl items were pink and all boy items were blue. The question then was how do you change the stereotypes put forth by popular brands and stores? “Newton Public Schools is actively working to create an anti-bias/anti-racist school environment. In fact, beginning in 4 th grade, we teach all students about the cycle of oppression that creates and reinforces stereotypes,” (Cooley, 248). Children in Ms. Cooley’s fourth grade class took part in this new curriculum as they learned much about how stereotypes can be unlearned in a society that teaches them and reinforces them. Family was a large topi