Yesterday’s class movie, The Butterfly Circus, had a huge impact among the students, so the classroom plans changed and I am going to continue teaching today about the movie and about integrating diversity and being diverse. I prepared this handout to give to the students today:

The questions I prepared for today’s class were: What do you think about The Butterfly Circus? What did you not understood? What is being diverse? (Including people with diverse abilities.) How the Butterfly Circus is diverse? (By allowing Will to act in the circus according to what he can do, not according to what he cannot do.) How is our school diverse? (By allowing everyone to learn according to what they can do, including the teachers.) What was your favorite part of the movie? My third grade students love to draw, so they loved the handout.

My cooperator teacher, along with other ESL teacher of the school, is going to make a research for next year’s TESOL convention. He kindly invited the student teachers to participate, if they want to, and I want to. In order to participate in the research, I need to be certified by CIPSHI (“Comité institucional para la Protección de los Seres Humanos en la Investigación”). I did not understand the instructions to get myself certified by them, so I am requesting a personal meeting with someone of CIPSHI to know what I must do to be certified. My cooperator teacher is going to research the perceptions of English use within the school’s students. This would be my first formal research experience! I had a hard time looking for the CIPSHI contact information, but I finally found a telephone and some emails. No one answered the phone, so I emailed them. I am waiting their response.

After my third grade ESL class I had a meeting with the special education teacher to talk about a very important thing that is related with integrating diversity: we talked about the reasonable accommodations that I need to take in count when planning and assessing my third grade ESL group. This is a learning community meeting. Because learning community meetings are a required part of my teaching practicum, I prepared a “learning community meeting sheet” to fill out in each meeting. This is the sheet I prepared:

A student gave me a paper flower and another student gave me a hug.

Let’s keep growing!