Grateful to return to working regularly with children.

I took a few years off regularly working with children to get my Etsy shop going, so I could sell my ceramics internationally, but now I'm excited to use my skills with children once again.  Last spring I taught  of a series of Mindfulness workshops with 12 year olds as part of the Well-Being program at the Benjamin Franklin International School in Barcelona. I'm pleased to be working in their Primary after-school program teaching bilingual language arts to the youngest students in the school and sharing my love of children's literature, song and crafts with them.

I am also on their list of substitute teachers.

Before school started I teamed with a friend from my ceramics studio and we worked day-care the faculty’s children at BFIS. We had lots of fun. I’ve included photos of the mural and spiders the children made after we read Anansi the Spider:a Tale from the Ashanti by Gerald McDermott. This book is always a big hit with children.

Lovely reviews of my work in MumsAbroad.com

http://spain.mumabroad.com/cat/Catalunya-818/Sitges-&-surrounds-352/Sitges-Service-Directory--339/Services-for-children-340

Well-being Workshops

I'm excited to offer Well-being workshops to schools, day care centers, businesses and private individuals. What are Well-being workshops? Read on...

Everyone learns better when relaxed and enjoying themselves.  The techniques in these workshops have direct applications for school but are really tools for living a focused, grounded and relaxed life.  Sessions start with movement exercises which incorporate gross motor skills, concentration and coordination. This is a playful way to stimulate use of both sides of the brain and also brings needed oxygen to it.  Next, I show concrete methods for relaxation and concentrating during both the school/work day and testing situations in age/grade appropriate ways.  The focus is then moved from the outer workings of each person to the inner workings: breath and body awareness--which aid self-awareness, self-esteem, concentration and relaxation.

My work experience has shown me the truth of the Chinese Proverb:

What I hear
I forget,
What I see
I remember,
What I do
I understand.

Multiple Intelligence studies have shown that when we engage the whole body in the learning process, people have more ways to input the information. This makes the experience more memorable, useful and gives more people a feeling of success and accomplishment.

I have been teaching people of all ages for 30 years. I've taught bilingual kindergarten, Business English to executives and business university students, dance and yoga to people of all ages--including an after school program for elementary school students with learning difficulties. I have designed courses as well: English through yoga, English through crafts, Middle Eastern and other types of dance as preparation for childbirth.

I now teach private classes and small groups how to improve their health and well-being through a series of exercises called Somato Reperatiory Integration (SRI.)  SRI was designed by Dr. Donald Epstein, a Chiropractor and visionary, who is also the creator of Network Spinal Analysis.  SRI uses  breath and body awareness, hand positions and phrases to allow people more control of relaxation. It also teaches them to live with more awareness and to respond to life instead of just reacting.

Additionally, I offer teachers workshops on getting children to focus and relax when they need to be extra alert.

Initially, I discovered all the mentioned activities to help myself because I am a very active person and needed methods to concentrate and relax. My teaching over the years has shown me the need to share this knowledge.

Do you knit or crochet?

A ceramicist friend that I was visiting with at a crafts fair yesterday was knitting squares for this marvelous project called "Knit a square ....and make an orphan warm."

Do you knit or crochet? All those little extra bits of yarn can be put to good use.
From their website...

It is estimated that there are 14.8 million orphans in sub-saharan Africa. 1.9 million live in South Africa.
The knit-a-square project was started as a family project in 2008 and although it is now a registered charity under the name of KasCare, the family is still 100 percent involved.
The project works hard to help warm and comfort these children and we would greatly value your contribution to this knitting project for the AIDS orphans of southern Africa. If you know anyone that knits, please share this with them.

The Olive Tree School

I'm very honored to continue working at The Olive Tree School. This year I will be teaching part time in the Year One class, or as we say in the US, Kindergarten. That's the grade I have the most experience with. I just love turning kids on to reading and incorporating the arts and movement into all our studies. Something research into Multiple Intelligences has shown to be very important.

In the 30 years I have been working in the field of Education, I hadn't ever come across a school that aligns so well with my philosophy of education and teaching. Olive Tree is an exciting and inspiring place to be working.

Earth Day 2010

I felt it was important to get my Inglés en Movimiento students thinking about how they take care of the Earth on the occasion of Earth Day which was April 22nd. I taught them a short dance that celebrates Earth. One of the movements involves imagining you are holding the Earth in your hand and another move is sending love from your heart into the world. We practiced English vocabulary for parts of the body, directions and the movements themselves. I asked each student to think of how they take care of the Earth, then passed around a little ball that had an Earth design on it. When they had the ball, they shared how they take care of the Earth in Catalan, then I'd repeat it in English.

The children I work with are 4 to 7 year olds. The "older" kids talked about recycling, using organic trash and manure for helping plants and trees grow, the importance of plants and trees, not wasting paper or pencils and taking good care of their toys so they last a long time. The strangest comment came from a 5 year old who mentioned "not breaking into other people's homes and stealing things"--I didn't have time to ask what inspired that answer.

Most of the 4 year olds were challenged by the concept of Earth being the planet where we live, but understood it as the ground under our feet. Also, in an effort to help them properly pronounce "Earth" in English we also practiced the "th" sound, because they don't use it much in Catalan. I had the children draw Earth on a piece of paper and on the other side they drew themselves taking care of it--a few of their drawings are shown here.

April 22 is Earth Day and here in Catalunya, where I live, St. Jordi, the patron saint of Catalunya is honored on April 23rd. It is "The Day of the Lovers" and later became "The Day of the Book and the Rose." A bookseller came up with the idea as the day also commemorates the day that both Miguel de Cervantes and William Shakespeare died. The tradition is that women buy a book for men and men buy women a rose. In the legend of "St. George and the Dragon," St. George kills the dragon to save the princess. This legend can represent the patriarchal culture conquering the Earth (the dragon is a symbol of the natural world) and the matriarchal societies who worked with the Earth, moving civilization into a model where power is exerted over the Earth. Looked at in this light, it's almost the opposite of Earth Day.