My students need a bilingual alphabet carpet for read alouds, calendar and weather reports, listening centers, community circles, alphabet games and author's chair.
One thing you don't typically think of is looking down to learn. As my students learn in English and Spanish all day every day, they need extra practice and reinforcement with their foreign language study. A bilingual alphabet carpet would be a great tool to help motivate and teach my students.
Did you know that originally there were thirty letters in the Spanish alphabet?
My students sing the alphabet song each day using those thirty letters. My classroom consists of first and second grade students who learn grade-level content standards all day in both English and Spanish and who are on their way to becoming bilingual and biliterate by sixth grade. They are highly motivated and love the challenge that bilingual learning provides. Our school consists of a wide variety of backgrounds and ethnicities. One of the goals of our bilingual program is to help build bridges between cultures. Nevada has very limited resources, especially for education. The parents, students, and staff try their hardest to improve the quality of education for our school.
My Project
A bilingual alphabet carpet would improve the quality of learning in my classroom. My students would sit in a circle on the carpet and learn the original thirty letters of the Spanish alphabet by pointing to them and singing or chanting. My students would learn alphabetizing skills by memorizing the order of the letters on the carpet. They would find and compare words from classroom textbooks with the letters on the carpet. They would present weather and calendar reports, read books aloud to each other, listen to books on cd, listen to teacher daily reports and share stories, photos, books, projects and plays in partners and groups and with the entire class. There would be a writing center on the carpet, and my students would use the carpet as a guide for how to spell words. Each student would have a new assigned letter to sit on each week to help with assigned seating and focused learning. They would read word cut-outs and place them on the corresponding matching letters on the carpet
My students would be incredibly excited to have a bilingual carpet that inspires a solid foundation for a lifelong pursuit of learning.
They would use it as a resource for fluency in reading and writing. A carpet would supplement the learning in a fun, comfortable way. Our classroom would truly exemplify "learning from the ground up."
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