Bartek's Blog

Working in a bilingual preschool & teaching children online-Justyna Wasek Reflection on the 2nd webinar on 22/12/2021 A screenshot of the presentation I was really engaged in the presentation. The theories the presenter mentioned are concluded from her hands-on experience. She is an in-service teacher working in a bilingual preschool, so she mainly focused on children aged from 2.5 to 6. Interestingly, there are more foreign teachers and assistants with people having different accents, which shows the diversity of the preschool and provides students with a good language learning environment. I was impressed by a quote she used in the presentation the most "It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men"- Frederick Douglas. Children do not only develop intellectual skills but also social counterparts. In order to achieve this, there are some programmes: positive discipline, Jolly Phonics/Jolly English, mindfulness, values, maths, fine motor skills and gros...

Online visit of ASW After one week's delay, on 7 December 2021, we finally had our online visit of the American School of Warsaw. Below is the schedule of the day: 9:30 Introduction 9:40- 10:00 Kindergarten morning circle/calendar time *playground observation of OPAL (Outdoor Play And Learning) Break 10:50-11:30 Art with Grade 4 11:40-11:55 Guided Reading with Grade 1 students** Break 12:50-1:30 Math games, then Shared reading in Grade 2 Q&A 1:40 End of visit. Because of the pandemic, it was conducted online, but it did not influence the effect that much. Though it was very attractive, I believe it would be more fascinating if we had the chance to observe it off-line.  The core programme is Primary Years Programme (PYP) in this stage. And it is mainly student-centred. Students are in the centre of education, and teachers are trying their best to meet students' needs. It is completely different from the education I received when I was young in China. Compared with the educa...

On this website  https://www.edutopia.org/,  there are three articles which are related to project-based learning (PBL) written by By  Jorge Valenzuela  on November 18, 2021 (Ending Project-Based Learning Units With a Call to Action),   Zachary Herrmann  on October 27, 2021 (6 Ways to Guide Students to More Authentic Work in PBL) and  Katie Piper  on October 14, 2021 (Getting Parents Excited About Project-Based Learning), respectively. The first article illustrates the significance of a call to action (CTA) in PBL, which can get learners involved and influence the external world outside of schools. The second one shows that it is of vital importance for learners to have an authentic learning experience, so the learning experiences are not meaningless for students. The last one demonstrates that teachers should endeavour to dismiss the suspicion of parents because there is a doubt for parents when they had some kind of PBL at a young age. ...