Dec. 5, 2016
11:30 pm
Beijing, China
Quick, quick, quick, because I need to go to bed.
So today was another full, crazy day, but I don’t want to talk about that. Instead, I want to tell you about the awesome training I had today. Because I’m a new teacher, I have a couple trainings a week. These trainings teach me how to do my job and all of the different aspects that entails. Additionally, we have some center-wide trainings that are mainly for new teachers, but are open to all. They are usually about a specific topic that older teachers can help with, get a refresher and some new ideas, or simply laugh at the new teachers. Today’s training (well, I actually had two trainings, so the first training) was open to all teachers.
Today we trained on Open Doors. These are the classes in which parents are invited into the classroom to watch a class and witness how we teach their kids. Specifically, we were talking about which activities would be good to use in these classes. As you can imagine, we have a lot of different games and activities we use throughout our teaching. Some of those are better to share in front of parents than others. Usually, we want to use games that maximize student production (showing their knowledge and what they can say) and are manageable. We don’t want something that is really rowdy and we’re limited in the space we have due to parents being in the room. Since we were discussing this, Gretchen and Jenny encouraged the new teachers to think of a game we could use in a classroom and share it. Originally it was just going to be new teachers in the room, but then we got an audience.
Running the training was a lot of fun. Four of us shared a game and the rest acted as students. Adam and May “acted” as parents in the back, aka they sat there and watched, and, in Adam’s case, took some pictures. It was fun to act as if we were all 6-year-olds and goof off with each other. It was also neat to see everyone’s different ideas. Overall, we probably spent around 45 minutes playing games and acting like children. That said, I actually learned a great deal and I’m excited to play some new games with my students.
*Blame Adam’s phone for the bad quality 😉
Goodnight and Bless,
Kristen
