Blogging Reflection

What does flexible seating look like in the classroom?

As I begin my school year off in a new grade level there are lots of changes and adjustments that I must confront. One big change that is undeniably visible is the use of desks!!! When I taught Kindergarten my seating was flexible in the sense that no student had an actual assigned seat, but instead would rotate through centers and chose a seat at the table they were assigned to be at in that moment. As I walked into my into my new 2nd grade classroom I almost forgot that desks would be involved. Thinking back to my own 2nd grade desk experience, and honestly the majority of my primary school experience, I remember the rigidness of rows facing the black board! I knew for sure that is not what I wanted to do, but also felt a bit at a loss of what it "should" look like. I picked at my colleagues' mind in the building and got great ideas of how to clusters desks together. But, when I looked online for more ideas and inspiration I was greeted by the idea of flexible seating.

Calm-down Corner

While tweeting for my #EDUC502 class many tweets about began to show up on my feed about calm-down corners, here is one that served as inspiration for this blog. The use of calm-down corners seem to be popping up more and more in classrooms around my school building. The students' adjustment back to building from online learning has been accompanied by many behaviors. At all grade levels I have spoken with colleagues that have mentioned that they have noticed the increase of behaviors such as students being physical with one another and having outbursts during their class. I did not start the school year off with a calm-down corner in my classroom but hope to incorporate it by the start of the next marking period. After picking at many colleagues minds I have put together a few items and ideas I would like to include in mine. I have heard how successful these corners can be, although also it does bring up more questions on management. If you have a calm-down corner how do you use

Spanglish

Spanglish is a term that is used in the Hispanic community when a person is speaking and mixes both English and Spanish words, either creating new words like "troca" for truck or buy interchanging languages as they speak through out the same sentence. This is a term I am incredibly familiar with since it was a big no-no in my household growing up. Even now as a dual language teacher my mother will still regañarme when I do it, but sometimes it feels almost necessary. For example using the word "regañar" for me felt more familiar and accurate; I could have said "scold me" but it wouldn't have been as natural. While of course there are times and places to use specific language over I agree with Dr. José Medina's Twitter post when he speaks of that when people, like my mother, have issues with the use of Spanglish they are linguistic oppressors when in reality it is higher cognitive skill to do so. (Kim et al., 2021) The American school system see

La maestria

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