Talking about their work...

I just got back from Costa Rica. We had a really successful day on Friday. We had an open house where the children presented all the project to the community, people from the Ministry of Education and from Omar Dengo Foundation.

They were all really happy with the work that the children and the teacher had done... they were impressed by how well the children were able to explain the projects, their learning process (regarding content and technical aspects of the projects) and how good they felt about their work. Parents were really proud!

People from the Omar Dengo Foundation and the Ministry are really committed to supporting the work... and they look forward to the project to continue next year!!

Reflecting on their learning process...

We are organizing an event for tomorrow. The children will be showing the projects they have built, as well as the ones they have made with their parents and the preschool kids. Parents, members of the community, and people from Omar Dengo Foundation and from the Ministry of Education will come to the event.

I am hoping to talk to people and capture their impression on the projects and on what has happened during the last few months. I talked to a student who graduated from the school last year. I want her to do the role of reporter and use the camera to capture some of these moments while I am talking to people and making sure things go well.

The children practice their presentations. It was very interesting to see them reflect on their learning. I asked them possible questions as they were presenting to get them to think and prepare for tomorrow. It was great to see how other children started to ask questions to help the other students. It was a lot of work, but children were working really hard to prepare and make their projects better!

When learning happens...

We continue to work on natural disasters. The seismographer is almost ready and we started to work on the anemometer. We actually built three different versions of the anemometer today to see which one moved better with the wind. Some of the girls got really interested when they saw me working on it, so they started to work with me.

I discuss this with the teacher. He has been spending a lot of time writing reports and documents for the end of the year and I worry that he is not doing the work with me and with the children. He is very interested and he comes to make sure he follows the work, but he is not taking an active role this week. I brought up how some of the most interesting learning experiences during these months have happened this way. When the children see me working on something, they want to collaborate with me and they naturally get engaged.

In the conversation he mentioned how children do the same at school. There are two or three students that have become sort of role models, once they figure something: a procedure, a way to change the windows settings and colors... all the others follow. I think this is all the result of a very open environment that allows collaboration and group work.

If I get the teacher to do the same I can have him reflect on what results he gets from the experience... for now, I have my own experience working with the children.

Parents getting involved...

The teacher and children have started an activity on natural disasters and this week we are building instruments to monitor disasters (earthquakes, floods, and hurricanes). I proposed to build a seismographer, an anemometer and a pluviometer.

Today we started by talking about what they have done the two weeks I was not in Costa Rica. They have done some research on natural disasters and created Microworlds project about it and about prevention. They started to work on the instruments and brought some materials to the school today. We started to work on the seismographer. They are really interested in that disaster. The grandfather of some of the kids came today to help. He built the instrument with some of the children, but we still have to put sensors and motors to make it work automatically. Some other children were building projects about how they think earthquakes happen, how movement propagates, etc. We will continue tomorrow with this project and the anemometer.

I learned today that some of the parents have started to learn MM. I saw few projects they have built. It is interesting to see in few weeks how they started to be less intimidated by the computer. The funniest part is that one mom did it first and other parents follow... they did not want to stay behind. The mom who started have had a computer for a while, but only now got interested in learning.