Teacher training week 2

Our second week of trainings went just as well as the first.

With each school, we worked together to create open-ended activity plans for each classroom. We provided the teachers with a blank template and helped them to fill in the details of each activity.

The template requires teachers to write in the name of the activity, the age which it is most appropriate for, exactly what the children will be doing, what the children are able to get out of this activity (which KDIs are included), materials needed, what they will need to do to prep the activity, how to modify the activity for children who may need extra help, and some open-ended questions they can ask during the activity to help children analyze and critically think.

Each teacher developed an activity specific to the interests and needs of the children in their classroom. For some classes, this included drawing and writing, for others it was activities involving singing and movement. The idea behind helping these teachers to fill out the plans is for them to understand how much a child is learning through open-ended, active, and engaging activities.

As stated previously, we will continue to prepare these activity plans with the teachers each week and also provide them with lots of additional ideas for activities, so that each school can have a binder of activity ideas at their disposal when we leave.

We hoped to be able to also discuss routines and daily plans this past week, but with Diwali being in the middle of the week, our schedule ended up a bit moved around and we were not able to spend as much time with each school as we hoped. So, we will begin with that this coming up week and continue to make great progress!