Monday, October 8, 2012

Note: AR idea

Pearson Teachers Conference was held yesterday. Due to all the daily routine work, I missed the half of the first presentation but took all 4 presentations for teaching young learners.

From the informative and inspirational presentations, I got three ideas.
1. Having pre and post activities with extensive reading program.
2. Providing some easy and doable tasks at home to encourage parental involvement for their children's  
    learning.
3. Setting proximal-sub goals
4. Researching what is good and bad praise

Instead of reading more research papers and books for my Action Research, I went to the conference having two annoying questions in mind;
1 What am I supposed to do with my completely demotivated daughter?
2 What would I do for my AR?

My instinct sometimes work really well. I got reasonable answers for the questions.
For the first one, I would read aloud my daughter's old time favorite series "Mr. Putter and Tabby." at breakfast or dinner table. She loves reading and I truly think it would be a huge loss if she gave up on reading English ones for there are so many brilliant literature to read. I also decided to see positive and good quality of her instead of pointing out her faults. Thanks to the doughnut theory. I may have been paying attention only on the hole not the yummy cake part. I think she lost motivation to do the best she can because of continuous disappointing results on mini-tests at school. She lost self-esteem without the sense of success. She is also trying to learn a challenging tune for the brass band competition in December. So, my job is to get her realize the cake part of her doughnut. She is kind and compassionate with her friends and good at drawing and crafts. She is also a good listener and knows a lot of good stories. I tend to get annoyed by forgetful and disorganized part of her because they are exactly the unfavorable characteristics of myself.

For the second question, I am not sure if it is doable or not yet but I would start recording my class again and identify what kind of praises I use. I realize the power of words and would like to use them carefully.

I've been learning a lot as a M.A. Mama. I found more faults in myself than positive qualities and get disappointed.  Perhaps from time to time, I should take a look at the cake part of myself as well and say to myself, "Chico, you are doing the best you can. No worries."


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