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| Photo: Christine Huard |
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| Enrichment teacher Diana
Rios instructs sixth-graders about measures and time signatures at
Lincoln Acres School in National City. Photo: The San Diego Union-Tribune |
Every
other Wednesday, Cynthia Valle-Lone leaves her sixth-graders in the
hands of another instructor so she can spend the morning huddled with a
small group of teachers and work on ways to help students do better in
school.
The time together gives
the teachers a chance to look at which child needs a gentle boost and
which needs to be pushed harder. Then they develop learning strategies
to take back to their classrooms at Lincoln Acres Elementary.
Valle-Lone
said she values the time to collaborate with her colleagues, and her
students love it, too. She said they ask excitedly on Wednesdays if it’s
the day Diana Rios, one of 19 full-time enrichment teachers hired by
the National School District to teach arts, will be there.
The
children now are learning to read and play music, but they also study
dance, theater and visual arts in five-week sessions throughout the
school year. The program also has a physical education component.
Launched
in 2014, the new approach has been a success for students and teachers
alike. When Valle-Lone bows out of the classroom, Rios steps in with a
lesson plan ready to go. That’s the way it works throughout the
district’s 10 schools. It means classroom teachers get real free time to
collaborate because they don’t have to prepare materials for the
enrichment teacher.
“It’s an
added bonus to have someone coming in with a lesson plan for the kids,”
Valle-Lone said. “They do a lot of activities that we don’t have a lot
of time to plan for.”
Teaming
up with other teachers in the same grade level allows Valle-Lone and her
colleagues to take a good look at the positive things going on in the
classroom and see the areas where they need to focus more attention, she
said.
The teacher said one
example of a benefit students are getting is that they are finding out
there are different ways to learn a subject. They’re also making
improvements to their math skills without knowing it.
Valle-Lone likes that what the children are learning in arts directly relates to the work she does with them in the classroom.
Last
week, the students spent the morning going over notes, measures and
time signatures that are the basics of music theory. They counted out
the beats of 1/8 notes, 1/4 notes, 1/2 notes and whole notes, and easily
connected the concept to fractions.
To teach rhythmic values,
Rios used an interactive white board to move notes onto the screen as
she asked which ones could be used to make up two, three or four beats.
As the students answered, she guided them to work with each other.
Source: The San Diego Union-Tribune
