Just another day in the drawing room...

Today I joined Prathom 2 and Khru Jeab for an art/vocabulary lesson! Where I learned a few new words myself.

Drawing or miming?

All the colours of the rainbow.

The art competition is coming along nicely, with all the kids participating and anticipating the results. Keep up the good work!

การอบรมเทคนิคการสอนการอ่านภาษาอังกฤษ

ระหว่างวันที่ 20-22 พฤศจิกายน 2550
ณ. โรงเรียนบ้านชำฆ้อ

การอบรมในครั้งนี้ได้มีครูผู้สอนภาษาอังกฤษช่วงชั้นที่ 1 จาก 3โรงเรียนได้แก่

1. ครูจงดี เจริญวงศ์ โรงเรียนบ้านท่าลำบิด
   
2. ครูนงนุช เอมอำไพวงศ์ โรงเรียนบ้านสองสลึง
   
3. ครูกรเทพ จันทนะผะลิน โรงเรียนวัดหนองกันเกรา
   

 
ได้เข้าร่วมสังเกตการสอนและฝึกทดลองสอนการอ่านภาษาอังกฤษโดยใช้วิธี Team English, Lucky Dip, Team Coaching, Matching Relay, Ball Drill เป็นการฝึกให้นักเรียนได้เรียนรู้จากการปฏิบัติ จนเกิดทักษะ เกิดความเข้าใจด้วยตนเอง และมีทักษะในการทำงานร่วมกันเป็นกลุ่มอย่างมีความสุข เด็กนักเรียนมีความกระตือรือร้นในการเรียนภาษาอังกฤษ ร่วมทำกิจกรรมอย่างสนุกสนาน สามารถใช้ภาษาอังกฤษในการสื่อสารได้เหมาะสมกับวัย

จากการสังเกตการสอนในครั้งนี้สามารถนำวิธีการสอนดังกล่าวไปใช้ในการจัดกิจกรรมการเรียนการสอนได้เป็นอย่างดีและควรที่จะส่งเสริมให้มีการสอนการอ่านภาษาอังกฤษอย่างต่อเนื่อง ในทุกระดับชั้น และขอขอบคุณผู้อำนวยการโรงเรียน และคณะวิทยากรโรงเรียนบ้านชำฆ้อ ที่เปิดโอกาสให้ได้เข้ารับการอบรมและถ่ายทอดความรู้ให้อย่างดียิ่ง

Van Gogh, Rembrandts and Prathom 6!

Crayons and pencils, paints and pens; the students have begun to let their imaginations wander on to paper!

With little persuasion, they took to the floor...

...and with Khru Bee's guidance, spent the afternoon using the left side of their brain!

They'll be fluent speaking artists in no time at all!

Teacher Training Starts

What a busy day at Ban Chamkho School! Apart from opening the Art Competition, as blogged by Meg, we had our first group of teachers come in from other schools for some informal training.

All three teachers teach Prathom (primary) 1, so we spent most of the day with P1 students.

Here we are as the day begins. The students are in their teams, but they don't have "uniforms" on yet. From left to right, that's Khru Tan (seated) from Ban Tha Lambit School, Khru Philaiwan and Khru Lek, regular P1 teachers from Ban Chamkho, Khru Dam from Ban Song Salueng School, and Khru Ten from Ban Nongtakrao School.







"1, 2, 3 go!" and the students are getting themselves set up for Phonics Lucky Dip.














Here I am, putting the #2s from each team through their paces.






In the afternoon, it was time for "Team Coaching", where team captains become the teachers. Here's Khru Tan helping the Blue Captain to coach her team on consonant-vowel blends.

What a luxury! 3 teachers between just 14 students. Homework for tonight is to think through how to run this by yourself when you have a class of 40 students. Still, that's what Team English is all about.

COMBINED VOCABULARY and ART COMPETION!

Today we announced the art competition, challenging all grades (from Anuban to Matthayom 3) to get out their paintbrushes and extend their vocabularies! The school was split up in to four groups based on ability and designated a number of vocabulary words to draw. There will be one winner for every word, who will receive a prize of five baht! This provides motivation for the students and rewards them for their efforts. All entries will be handed in by lunchtime of the 30th of November and winners will be announced on the 3rd of December!

Each winning drawing will be loaded on to the blog so that we can all view the artistic talents of the school and benefit from the research and execution of the task.

Chok dee! Good luck!

We look forward to seeing what the students come up with!

Art Competition

According to the foreign language curriculum guidelines from the Thai Ministry of Education, students should have a vocabulary of 2,500 words by the time they finish Mathyom (secondary) 3. That begs the question: what does it mean to have a word in your vocabulary?

Traditionally, in Thai schools, it means simply knowing the word's nominal translation, spelling, and perhaps a rough approximation of its pronunciation. I remember when I first started in this job, showing a picture of a cat to a student, asking what it was, and he proudly responding: "c cat maew", maew being the Thai word for cat. I tried to explain to him that the "c" and the "maew" were really unnecessary; that just "cat" would be fine, but he'd have none of it. "c cat maew” is what had been drilled in to him and “c cat maew” was what he was going to regurgitate!

To break through this kind of thinking, I've been setting up a picture bank of as much common vocabulary as possible. Of course, simply replacing translation with pictures is not going to solve the problem by itself, but it does contribute to the solution.

To that end, we're having an art competition at Ban Chamkho School. Meg O'Connell, a young volunteer from Australia, has come to help out this month, so this has been a good project for her to get her teeth into. Hopefully, Meg will blog a bit about her experiences here before she heads off back to Australia next month.

This Wednesday (14 November 2007), we'll announce the competition to the students, together with target vocab lists for each of Anuban (kindergarten), Prathom (primary) 1-3, Prathom 4-6, and Mathayom 1-3. If all goes to plan, our picture bank should have about 160 new items by the end of the month.

Each winning entry will receive prize money of 5 Baht (call me Mr Generosity ), and more importantly, the honor of being used in our learning materials. So expect some additions to our Downloads section, as Thais love to say, “coming sooooon”.

"Training" at Ban Chamkho School

So, finally the blog is up and running, and I can't think of where to start. Well part of the idea is to change my habit of writing rare epics rather than regular updates, so I'll try not to think too much.

If you'd like to know some background about our project, sorry but you'll have to catch up later - that's an epic that needs to be written when I'm in the mood for it. For now I'll just tell you about what's happening this month.

First, we have teachers from several schools in the area coming to Ban Chamkho School for "training". Training is in quotes because I don't plan to do much formal training. I'm hoping that by coming here and sharing in what we're doing here, it will make it easier to set up something similar in their own schools.

Last term, I think we made great progress at BCK, and ironically, that made it more frustrating for me trying to explain Team English, Synthetic Phonics, Lexical Approach and so on to teachers from other schools. So rather than waste my breath and their time, I invited them to come and see for themselves.

That being said, I did sit down today and map out a rough schedule, so we should have a good mix of observing the BCK teachers, traditional training sessions, teaching practice sessions and workshops.

What's the difference between a training session and a workshop? Call me old-fashioned, but I really dislike confusing these terms. My idea of a workshop is where we get together and physically make something - in this case, teaching materials. Perhaps "sweatshop" is closer to my intention, but then that's not very PC is it?

Anyway, the first group of teachers is scheduled to come Tuesday to Thursday of next week (20 to 22 November). I'll post some details and photos after that.