These mini-episodes are a way to share more art by amazing teaching artists as well as some resources and tips, challenges, shout outs, and wisdom from my 5 year old. The goal is to make these weekly, but we’ll see how that goes!
Featured Teaching Artist
I’ve been working on more ways to support and highlight teaching artists and one idea that I’m starting right away is a weekly featured artist opportunity. Featured artists will have their work shared on our social media and website as well as mentioned here on these mini-episodes of the podcast! Yay! You can apply here.
I’ve also added an opportunities page with links to apply to be a guest on the show and to apply for our open calls through our sister project, Contemporary Art for Young Audiences, which is an online gallery run in collaboration with Maria Coit of Curated for Kids. Maria and I are planning to open a call soon, so join our mailing list and keep an eye out.
Resource & Tip of the Week
Paula Liz shared an incredible lesson to start the year! Whether you’re just starting or are a little way into your school year, this is a great way to learn your students’ names and help them get to know each other. Here’s what Paula Liz said about it:
When introductions are made (even via zoom) it is important to remember that names are an essential part of who we are as individuals. It is how we are recognized and acknowledged. In addition, names are likely the most important word in the world to our students. Because of that, it is paramount that we not only know our students’ names but also how to properly pronounce them. For this video art lesson I am going to have students teach others their name through a unique work of art. For inspiration we take a look at the phenomenal work of Matthew Tapia, Christee Jordan, and Sneha Shrestha.
Paula Liz recommends the book Teach Us Your Name: Empowering Children to Teach Others to Pronounce their Names Correctly by Huda Essa.
She created a fantastic bilingual Spanish/English video for this lesson and you can get the lesson on TpT.
Follow her @ms.paulaliz and subscribe to her YouTube channel for more amazing lessons.
Here’s another great book to use for this lesson: Your Name Is a Song by Jamilah Thompkins-Bigelow.
Paul Liz shared with me that she teaches at a two way immersion school where they promote translanguaging, which is a new term for me. This took me down a bit of an internet rabbit hole. In one article, I found a helpful differentiation between code-switching and translanguaging:
According to Lewis, Jones, and Baker (2012), code-switching practices the notion of separating languages whereas translanguaging focuses on learning both languages at the same time without separating.
Here are a few more articles and books:
- The Translanguaging Classroom: Leveraging Student Bilingualism for Learning
- Codemeshing in Academic Writing: Identifying Teachable Strategies of Translanguaging (this one is behind a paywall, but maybe you can access it through your local library)
- Translanguaging for Emergent Bilinguals: Inclusive Teaching in the Linguistically Diverse Classroom (Language and Literacy Series)
- The Translanguaging Classroom: Leveraging Student Bilingualism for Learning
Challenge of the week
My daughter started online kindergarten last week. Whew! Beyond the technology, working through the emotions she’s going through right now has been quite a challenge. If you also have a kindergartener, I would love to connect!
Despite the challenges of this method of learning, I feel so grateful to not only keep my daughter home safely, but also to be able to stay with her and help her navigate this experience.
Shout Outs
Thank you sooooo much Christine! I always mention how reviews help get the podcast seen by more people. This is because of the way Apple Podcasts ranks and recommends podcasts… and that’s about all I know about it.
I also just love to hear your thoughts! What do you like about this show? What should I do more of? Leave a review and let me know!