Introduction: Colegio Mexico - Guaymas

Nestled in a beautiful sparkling bay alongside the Sea of Cortes in Guaymas, Sonora, Mexico, is the coastal community of Miramar. Colegio Mexico is a small private school in Miramar, which provides education for students in grades 1-8. Colegio Mexico is a larger organization, which opened this school  in this location three years ago. The setting had previously belonged to another school. I have been working with the first graders there. Their classroom teacher, Mary Garcia, teaches content areas such as reading, writing, math, social studies and science, while their former kindergarten teacher and Rosa Romandia Padilla, spends one hour a day in their classroom teaching English.

Mary Garcia and Rosa Padilla

I met Maestra Padilla upon visiting the school to offer to volunteer some time with students in their English class, teaching through the use of children’s literature and arts integration. Maestra Padilla was very interested in opening her classroom to me so that I could come and partner with her to teach English to her students. We established Friday as a good day for my lessons, as their learning on Monday through Thursdays is more structured reading and writing from a text on learning English. Friday would be arts integration day.

The school is a simple concrete building set on a lot that is neatly landscaped with grass and dirt playing fields for the children. The classrooms are small, and colorfully decorated. They do not have heat, but have a mini-split air conditioner in each room, a necessity, for this community where the temperature can reach over 100 degrees Fahrenheit, from May through October.

Colegio Mexico - Guaymas

Mary Garcia's Classroom 

The English Wall by Rosa Padilla

When I arrive the children are at recess. They are playing in the courtyard, and on the grounds around the building. Some are running and others are gathered around, socializing with friends. A few are gathered by the office where I meet Maestras Padilla and Garcia. Mary leaves her small classroom to us as Rosa and I gather our materials in the front of the classroom to begin our lessons.

Rosa Padilla and Julia Barwell

I bring my guitar and always a bi-lingual book to read to the children. Rosa and I take turns reading the pages with lots of energy and animation, as we engage the children in a story that is related to the vocabulary for the day. I create songs, and movement, using visuals, and then close the lessons with some kind of visual arts experience that is usually tied to writing. The structure for the lessons has evolved from the first day. It seems a natural fit to use stories and movement to begin building vocabulary. I play with music by taking existing Mexican and American folk or children’s songs to adjust the lyrics to fit with our learning. The visual arts experience is intended to allow the children to demonstrate their learning through visual images and tie it to writing with simple sentences, labels or captions in English. As you scroll through the pages of this blog, you will see my lesson descriptions and examples of the children’s work.  My intent is to also post the materials I have created, along with MP3 files of the songs we sing with the children. Your feedback is welcome, as you view the work that I post and I would love to hear your ideas as well. Thank you for your interest in my blog! 

Our Homes: A Musical and Watercolor Experience

Our Homes: A Musical & Watercolor Experience

February 1^st

Today we were exploring the rooms in our homes and the objects found in them.  Vocabulary words such as bedroom, bed, kitchen, table, bathroom, bath, etc. were embedded into the student’s content learning. I wanted to find a way to make a stronger connection to music for the students as we were exploring the vocabulary. Their teacher, Rosa also wanted the students to have an experience with watercolors. I had borrowed a set of them from a colleague of mine, Jessica Howe, a kindergarten teacher at Homer Davis Elementary School in Tucson.

I prepared a lesson that began with the book, This House is Made of Mud, written by Ken Buchanan. The illustrations by Libba Tracy are beautiful watercolors of the various features of a round adobe home that is set in the Sonoran desert. I was hoping that the illustrations would inspire students to explore the use of watercolors to create a setting. I prepared two examples, one of a kitchen and one of a home in the desert. The book is written in Spanish and English, so Rosa and I took turns reading the pages to the students.

I noticed that they are starting to get used to having a story read to them while in class. About half of the children really seemed to settle in for the reading. After the story I had prepared a song about a house in which words could be substituted for rooms and objects within a room. I decided to use a tune that would be familiar for the students based on a child’s song called Mi Rancho. I substituted words for rancho and the animals found there to create a song about a house. “Oh come into my house in Arizona___, oh come and see my house in Arizona; In my kitchen there’s a table, In my kitchen there’s a table…”  I created a chart with the lyrics and a place to substitute kitchen and table for other words, and the place for the home, such as Guaymas or Hermosillo. We repeated the song with other rooms – bedroom, bathroom, living room, and familiar places. I watched carefully as the students helped us to create verses. I noticed a lot more participation this week with the song.

The students were very excited about watercolors. We distributed the materials and let them go with the directions of painting their home or a home that they imagine, either indoors or outdoors. I am not sure of how much actual watercolor instruction took place. It was a time to let them go, and have fun with their creations. I think that there was a lot of exploration involved in mixing colors. The brushes they used were fairly large. I was amazed at the detail that some students were able to include in their paintings. Most students elected to paint houses in settings as in the story. However there were a few rooms.

Camila painted a beautiful bedroom with a bed that looked like it was designed for a princess. It even had a pretty chandelier on the ceiling.

Jocelyn’s painting was interesting. She painted several rooms, including some outdoor features of her home.

I was very excited to notice that a couple of small groups of students whose desks were clustered together spontaneously began singing our new song while they were painting. The English flowed for the first part of the song… “Oh come and see my house in Guaymas”… I believe that the familiarity with the song and its repetition of phrases allowed students to feel more comfortable with singing in another language.

Some of the paintings are pictured here as they were drying. I wish that I had more time to interview students to find out what they were thinking as they were painting. However with the limited time for painting and clean up I was only able to walk around and view their work. It would be great to have more time for this. However, as a guest, it is important that I don’t overstay the time we have, and ask for too much. I am still trying to discover how my volunteering is making an impact on the students and their teacher.

I would describe the lesson as a little messy with the materials, but well worth a little chaos. It was wonderful to see their excitement about painting. It is exciting to introduce different media to them and watch them work. They are so able to arrange themselves with their desks in a way that allows them to work together to share water, and even paints if necessary. I never hear a squabble about sharing materials. That seems to happen naturally in this classroom. Their exploration with watercolors revealed a host of information about their styles of approaching this task and their learning style preferences. In our model we asked them to draw before they began painting. For some students, mixing and exploring color mixing on their pallets was an experience that drew their attention. I would not hesitate to do this again. I think that they would love it. 

Inside Our Homes with Shapes

February 15^th

Inside Our Homes with Shapes

The content for this lesson was to continue learning about the rooms in homes and to embed words for shapes with them. The students were learning the names for triangle, square, circle, rectangle; most are words that are similar in Spanish…cuadrado, circulo, triangulo, etc. There was a bit of new learning about verbs, which would be the next set of vocabulary words for upcoming lessons. The art was up to me. My goal was to work with music again to make the learning interesting and engaging, and to continue to work with contexts for writing. The students were very successful with writing in the last lesson where I had used some cloze sentences for going to Carnival. I wanted to continue with the expectation that students would align their art with writing. We have clearly established that my Friday visits are a departure from their routine of working in their books, and are an opportunity for learning through the arts. My secondary goal was to learn all of their names. I am so thoroughly stretched by teaching in this new context that I am having a hard time learning the students’ names. I have decided that I would give the children name tags and take photos of them wearing them so that I could spend some time memorizing them between visits.

I was quite challenged by planning this lesson. The content was similar to two previous lessons, and I didn’t want to plan for anything that was too easy or too redundant for the children. I had a book called Fiesta written by Ginger Fogleson Guy, which included some vocabulary about fiestas. I thought that it would follow up on our earlier lesson, and they had all just come back to school after three days off for Carnival. I planned to read them the story and then repeat the My House song. With my limited art media here in Mexico, I had to come up with a lesson that was not going to require a lot of new materials, but would be somewhat interesting. I still had some cut up shapes from our first lesson with animal shapes. I decided to have students create a picture of a room in their house, or the inside of their house, using the cut out shapes. I was concerned that making another “map” might have been too redundant for them, as their second lesson was about maps. From a social studies point of view, we could be mapping every week and have a different purpose for doing so. However, I was unsure of how well I could communicate that to their teacher.  Therefore, I decided to call it a picture even though it was essentially a map. I created some cloze sentences for the students to describe their pictures. This is a picture of my house. “This is a picture of my living room. It has a couch that is a square. There is a table that is a circle and there is a chair that is a square.” I designed it so that the sentences each started on a new line, not in a paragraph format. I wasn’t sure if it would be too difficult to follow, so I made an example with shapes and labels.

To begin working with verbs, I wanted to teach them a new song. I chose the song, Baby Beluga, by a songwriter named Raffi in the 1980’s, and well known to children in the U.S. I chose it because it has some familiar and often used verbs and it is a great song. Besides, all children growing up by the sea should know this song about a beluga whale.

Off I went to teach. The structure of the lesson was in place. The students were great about reviewing some vocabulary and they enjoyed the book.  We started singing the songs they had learned and I had charts posted with the song lyrics. They loved the Baby Beluga songs, and a few students asked me to bring them a copy of the lyrics for the whole song. We substituted some words for rooms in their houses in the Come into My House song and it seemed that they were pretty comfortable with the vocabulary. Revisiting this song was fun for them, as it was a familiar and successful activity during our previous lesson.

We transitioned into the shape activity. I modeled from my example and we distributed the materials. This part of the lesson is always chaotic because the students want to come up to the front of the room to get all of their materials. With their name tags it was easier to reinforce who was following directions and praise them. Some students began to pick up what I was doing with that. Some cared, and some clearly did not. But it was interesting to see who responded. Eventually all students got to work, but it is interesting to see how much visiting occurs in transitions. I try to keep them as busy as possible. We distributed materials and students began working.

The children really liked working with the shapes again. The immediately envisioned rooms and homes and used the shapes and colors to build elaborate floor plans. Once their plans were created, the writing portion was a bit challenging for them. Instead of writing at the bottom of the page, the students seemed to find it easier to label each shape as a couch, table, etc. with the English and Spanish words. This is such a natural way to use written words, to label them right on each object. A few attempted the cloze sentences with some help from their teacher and myself. 

The children immediately started working to create floor plans with their shapes. They seemed to know what they wanted to design and which shapes and colors would facilitate their ideas. 

Chrystian had a clear idea of how he could use the shapes, but found that labeling each piece of furniture in two languages was easier for him to do. 

Erin used the shapes to create a design that was much like the images she saw in her space. Note the pink shape is perhaps a sectional couch or some kind of less common article of furniture with pentagram-like shapes. 

Jessica's plan included some three dimensional pop-up-like shapes for couches. She worked independently to add quite a bit of detail. She also wanted to complete the writing and asked for assistance so that she could finish the close sentences. 

If I were teaching them the following day I would have students go back and identify the shapes, and perhaps identify colors as well. We could model the writing together with a chart after the art activity. This would allow them to be free to create their ‘pictures’ of their homes and then go back and analyze the shapes on the following day. In terms of the activity’s strength in building geometry concepts, the students could analyze how many shapes they created, categorize them, and look for angles, etc. Done in stages, this integration of art, geography and mathematics would be an excellent way to utilize the art form to build literacy in mapping, English vocabulary and geometry terms and concepts. The arts integration tenet of insight lends itself to looking at the symbiotic relationship between ideas, content, and the arts, and encourages discovery. I believe that this activity could be modified to embrace that tenet and allow students the time to further explore their creations by looking at them in a new way. Upon first look this lesson appeared not to hit a mark of success. However, in looking more carefully at what the students created, it has generated new possibilities for their learning though the process of arts integration. 

Carnival & Articles of Clothing

January 25^th 

Our day began today with a lesson about articles of clothing. I wanted to take a song and modify it to create a context for the topic and have students connect their singing to writing. I began with a bag of clothing, pulling out different articles and having students help me to name them. I had also prepared several photos of clothes that I held up for students to identify the English word for them, along with their color. They enjoyed identifying the clothing, and I noticed that they want to put the noun in front of the adjective. For example, I heard lots of students say "pants blue". This is the natural structure of their home language. Their teacher, Rosa corrected them and explained that in English the adjective is in front of the noun. I imagine that this skill will be a developmental, much like my own acquisition of their language. This activity built into our lesson content. I had the children stand up and pretend to put on shoes, shirts, gloves, hats, etc…to pantomime the actions and assist in the memorization process. 

I had also prepared a song for them. The song was based on an American folk song, Mary Wore a Red Dress… I wanted to have a context for wearing a special “outfit” and as the students all wear uniforms to school, I wanted to find another context that was special to six and seven year old children. Carnival is a huge holiday in Guaymas, including a few days off from school. This seemed like a great context for thinking about wearing something special. During this wonderful fiesta, participants and spectators wear beads, carnival masks, and very colorful outfits. Our new song went like this…____________________ wore a _______________   __________________ when he/she went to Carnival.

I taught them the song and we inserted many children’s ideas. For example; “Jessica wore a pink mask, when she went to carnival”We sang the song and then talked about what they might wear to the upcoming Carnival parade. I had prepared a handout for the students to write the English words for their verse of the song, and then draw themselves in the context of the carnival. I also made the decision to have them insert the pronoun he or she for their sentence. They enjoyed the task, and drew some wonderful pictures of themselves at the parade. Many of them were wearing masks, and they drew themselves wearing tuxedos or dresses, much like the children and adults on the floats in the parade. From this lesson I learned a lot about their personal interests and how they imagined themselves at Carnival. It is such a big community event. I was able to attend the Carnival parade , and I saw children wearing wonderful masks that were available everywhere, as well as throwing confetti, and children and adults in the parade wearing colorful costumes. 

Neithan and a few other boys wanted to know how to write the English word for tuxedo. However, the direct translation for the word used is "smoking". Their teacher was not sure of whether to use the word "smoking" or "tuxedo". It is interesting that some words do not directly translate. I saw a few young boys on floats in the parade wearing tuxedos. This helped me to understand their thinking. Context is everything. 

Jessica drew the setting for her carnival outfit. She imagined herself in a pink dress and included vehicles pulling beautiful floats. I love that she always includes a dog in her pictures, which makes me wonder if she has a dog or just imagines herself with one. 

Chrystian, like many other students, drew himself in a mask. He also included a lot of confetti in his picture, which is an element that is everywhere ar the Carnival parade. Like many other children, he wanted to include a couple of articles of clothing. Of course, if he wore a red jacket he must wear a red mask as well. 

Scarlett is smaller and a bit younger than the rest of the students. She drew a wonderful girl in a green dress, and then wrote "Scarlett wore a pink dress when she went to Carnival." What a beautiful picture! This is a great way to assess whether or not they know their color words. This makes me think about the point at which we begin to think in a second language. Would colors be one of the first sets of words that we might think because they are so visual? It seems that our brains might more automatically use the second language to find the correct word. In any event, Scarlett had the dress, but her pretty shade of green was not pink. However, one of the pictures I showed early in the lesson was of a green dress, much like the one in her drawing. She must have liked that dress, and the color word was less important to her. 

Today it felt more and more like the layers of the lesson were assisting students with their language and keeping them engaged. I discovered so much about the importance of context not only in creating an interesting and perhaps relevant setting for lesson content, but in my own understanding of culture. From a teaching perspective, it appears to work well to have students move from one activity carefully scaffolded to another, building on the new vocabulary and content for the lesson. The students could easily do the writing with a model. The song prepared them well for this task. They had to choose a color, a pronoun and an article of clothing to complete the sentence. I am very challenged by doing all of this with children who are truly not English language speakers. Everything we do together could open the door to building fluency and help them to feel at ease in their language acquisition. The movement and music are key to the flow. The visual arts reveal what is most important to the children and possible what content they are absorbing from the lesson. I did notice that they are still mostly passive in their participation with the music, and in our next lesson I would like to explore ways to engage them more with singing in English. 

Concepts of Mapping

Today I was prepared to work with students to build the concept of mapping. Sara Fanelli's My Map Book is a wonderful resource for thinking about open concepts of maps. I have prepared the book with numerous post-its that will help me to remember the Spanish words for her captions. I feel like I am working just as hard to find the children’s natural home language vocabulary, as they are to understand mine.

I read the book to the children and they were very interested in the beautiful images and the variety of maps. Having the Spanish words for some of the features helped to lure them into the book. I also have a small collection of desk maps of the world, and a relief map of the United States. I have examples of neighborhood maps, and features of conventional maps. However, I wanted the students to feel free to map anything, which is what Sara Fanelli's book encourages. She maps her dog, her stomach, her bedroom, her day, etc... I was most interesting in seeing what their concept of maps looks like. 

The students were very interested in creating their own maps. I created a template for them with a place for a title. I wanted them to feel like the paper they were working with was a real space for a map. I used a border to create a boundary or frame for their drawing. They have colored pencils that they use daily and are in their pencil boxes. This was an ideal medium for their maps because they could include detail. They were encouraged to use as many captions as possible. Some students were eager to label everything in English, and others were more freely labeling in both languages. I wanted to encourage them to label in any language, to use writing as a vehicle for providing information on their maps. Fluency being the initial goal, I believe that the English can be emphasized more stringently later when I know more about what they are capable of producing. 

Their maps were varied. There were some excellent maps of the world.

One girl drew the world as a sphere had a lot of detail and color. She clearly saw the world and it’s features as a sphere with water and landforms.

One boy, who drew a sphere, labeled places he knows, including nearby towns and cities in his state of Sonora. He used a world map to include some other places, such as Russia, China, India. He wanted to fill all of the spaces with names of places; familiar and faraway, perhaps places he had heard of.

Another boy drew a map of the seaside, and although unfinished when photographed, one can see that he has a pretty clear concept of the landforms, landmarks, and a sense of place. He lives in a community that is near the beach, so it is likely a very familiar setting for his map. It appears to have quite a few details that he has recalled from his own experience.

As for non-traditional maps, there was a great map of a dog drawn by a girl who, according to her teacher, likes to draw perros as often as she can. She worked hard to label all of the elements of her dog map in both English and Spanish.

One of my favorite maps was completed by a girl, who sat quietly in the back of the room. Her idea was to create a map of her stomach. I think she must have thought about everything she had eaten in the past few days…lots of pollo (chicken), sandwiches, chocolate milk, and some unidentified foods written in Spanish. Her map was more of a record of activity over time in her stomach, perhaps including some of her favorite things. Included were three chiclés (gum), perhaps swallowed by mistake. 

 It would be fun to interview these children after they create their maps to ask them about them. This would be challenging with the time frame we have (fifty minutes). They did not complete their maps this time, and I was a little disappointed that I didn’t get to see their completed ones.

 This was a great lesson because it allowed me to get to know the children a little better through understanding their perspectives visually and through their interests. They are very social and as soon as they know they are going to have the opportunity to work on some visual arts they slide their chairs into little groups and share spaces and materials. They seem to know where they want to be and how they prefer to be more productive. I was surprised by this, as I had expected them to be more passive, in response to what I thought would be a more structured environment. This was my paradigm – that in Mexico, classrooms are more structured. Perhaps this may be true in some places, but here there appears to be some freedom as to how the teachers want to structure their classroom environments. Allowing them to be free to work this way allows me to get to know them in a more natural way. Their teachers sees that they are social and as a new teacher is learning some strategies to reinforce productivity. She also sees that this particular group gets excited about change, and when faced with a different instructor, or teaching style, they get very excited. This is no different from my own experience with elementary school children in the United States. Particularly in an open setting.

   I will be gone for two weeks, but when I return, I want to align my lesson with what they are learning in the classroom, and start to challenge myself to build the arts into a structured curriculum. Their teacher, Rosa, has told me that it is great for them to have this on Friday, as Monday though Thursday they do a lot of writing in their English textbooks and journals. I will try to take the content of their current units and see how I can use music, movement and visual arts strategies to engage them with the content. This will call for some flexibility in thinking about how to embed the arts in a meaningful way, or in ways that assist the children in learning concepts and vocabulary in a new language. 

Geometric animals

This is my first day working with a class of 20 first graders in a small seaside community in Guaymas, Sonora, Mexico. I have worked for a year to find a school where I can spend some of my time volunteering in classrooms. I am so excited to walk in the gate. I think back to the first day I stepped foot on a school campus in Nogales, Arizona, just across the border, to teach music in a K-6 school. It was a culture shock coming from Boston, and I loved the anticipation of getting to know children whose roots were from cultures much different from my own. Today, I have no idea of what to anticipate. There is a fence around the school with an intercom so that visitors can be buzzed into the gate. My limited Spanish is improving every day, but I must admit that I am not feeling completely confident in my ability to communicate. I hear a voice on the other end asking, in Spanish who is there. "Señora Julia Barwell para la Maestra Rosa". The gate buzzes and I am on my way....

The children are playing in the schoolyard when I arrive. I am feeling a little nervous. After thirty-two years of working with children, you would think that this would be automatic for me, but it is nothing like that. I am attempting to function with my limited second language skills and my expectations for myself are high. I want to make a good impression. I want the children and their teacher to look forward to my coming to their classroom. I want to feel like I am making a difference with their development of the English language. I want to effectively use my understanding of the arts to integrate meaningfully with their language development. I want them to look forward to my arrival. 

Their teacher, a lovely young woman named Rosa is there to greet me by the office. We have discussed today's lesson through emails. The students have been learning shapes and colors. I have tied these together with a book called "Moon Rope / Un Lazo a la Luna  by Lois Ehlbert. The book has beautiful art where animals are created with geometric shapes. I am adding in animal vocabulary through this story. The book is written in two languages with somewhat simple text. Rosa and I partner read the story aloud to the children as they sit, two together at small trapezoid shaped tables. I sneak a peek at the children's faces and they look excited, with big smiles on their faces. 

After the reading we stand up and do some movement. "How can we make our bodies shaped like a triangle?" I ask, with some Spanish sprinkled in...fortunately the Spanish word for this is triangulo. Movement is such an excellent tool for communication because children love to get out of their seats and they just need to follow physically. We make circles, squares, rectangles, etc...before sitting down. Then I ask think to think about the animals in the story and other animals they know. Looking at Lois Ehlbert's art work in the book, we examine her use of shapes to make pictures and animals. Taking a few shapes I create a simple visual model with some shapes I have prepared for the lesson. I can see that they are ready, by the looks on their faces. 

They set off to work...

Their creativity exceeds my expectations. I see all kinds of animals and students are modifying the shapes to make them work. Faces are drawn and backgrounds are incorporated into their work. I can see how inventive they are. We are writing names of animals in English. In retrospect, I think that the next time I will also have them write more, perhaps a caption. My challenge is the same. I know a lot of words in Spanish, but I am working on stringing them together with sentences. In effect, we are in the same place in acquiring our new languages. It gives me a lot to think about. How do the arts facilitate this? How can I use more intent in my next lesson?