Warning!!! Teacher Nerd Alert!!!

Dear faithful reader,

The following blog post is filled with information only about the educational philosophy of the school we will be working at. If you don't care to hear about it please feel free to skip this post.

After 11 long and somewhat exhausting days in Istanbul we are back in Alanya and in our new apartment (I won't get into that, that will be covered by Erin). The time we spent in Istanbul was helpful in allowing us to learn more about the philosophy of the school and how they expect us to teach. Although most of the information was review for Erin and I, who seemed to be two of the more experienced teachers as far as classroom time goes, it was reassuring to hear that many of our important philosophical beliefs about education align with the schools. The school performs a learning-style assessment on each child every year to help the teacher design the lessons for the class. The report that we get includes a break down of how the children in our class will best receive the information we are trying to get across. Some of the styles include Linear, Kinesthetic, Musical, Reading etc. In fact on the last day Erin and I both got rather excited when we spent 4 hours discussing how to motivate students without bribes, and the importance of having "brain gym" exercises in the lessons.

The Brain Gym is a concept (from a book called Smart Moves by Carla Hannaford) that the preschool teacher in me understands and loves, but I know it is left out of many of america's classrooms. "What is it?" you may ask, let me tell you. The idea of the brain gym is that we can use different physical activities to wake the brain up, improve concentration and help children focus in class. While we already knew the importance of the mind-body connection in early learning it was great to see a school spend so much time on it in their training. Erin cried she was so happy, I got a little misty (I mean it wasn't Major League or anything).

The School where we were being trained was located on a beautiful campus. In fact there were two campuses within a 5 min. walk of each other. The building we were trained in belonged to the Science and Technology High School, a school that seemed to have a learn by doing philosophy. As we wandered around the High School we discovered a museum of knowledge that included many hands-on representations of famous discoveries. Erin likened this place to San Francisco's Exploratorium. You could wander through, and experience many of histories different scientific discoveries. What a great way to teach science.

This campus also had an entire room dedicated to lego building. I believe this served them well because in the lobby there was a case that had 2 shelves dedicated to trophies from the European Lego League competitions. It seemed that this school had a great philosophy for teaching children the skills necessary to further scientific study in the future. We took some photos and I created a new album just for them on the right.

The other campus, where we would eat our 3 meals a day, was the Primary School campus. Erin and I decided that we would love to work at this school based on seeing 2 of the rooms on the way to the cafeteria. One room was dedicated to music, including the floor piano from Big, and a mural of the world painted on one wall with real instruments hanging from the country they originated in. We walked by several times when different school groups were playing in the room. The other room was an entire room dedicated to children's art projects, the atelier that the ASICC always dreamed of. We both feel like we were pretty lucky to have gotten a job with a school that seems to have a great philosophy on education.