Speech for Grade 1 Students’ Parents       

       By Thomas William Doyle

l INTRODUCTION

First and foremost I would like to thank the parents for trusting us with your children by bringing them to our school.  

My name is Thomas William Doyle and I have been a teacher since 1996 after having completed my degree in Education from The Ohio State University.

I started my career in education in working with third and fourth grade children and worked with them in regular education and in the field of special education. After that I went to India for a year and then I went back to America for 6 months which motivated me to come to China to continue to use my teaching skills which i had gained.

I've been teaching in China for over six years, in that time I spent several months in Shanghai, then I was transfered to Nanjing where I spent the remainder of my time with adults and kids at E.F. After this time, I come to work at Huamei International School where I can focus on working with your sons and daughters and helping them to improve in the areas of Science, Reading and Physical Education.

l STREAMS

Using this stragety, learning is focused on cooperative learning, we encourage students who have mixed abilities to work together by promoting small groups or whole group activities.

Instruction in our lessons is inquiry-based whith an emphansis on question solving of real world problems

Differentiation is key, with the understanding that each student is different and has different ways of learning and trying to reach those abilities using many different methods.

We use technology in the classroom, the class is a 21st century classroom where the use of the computer is given a high priority and is used to help encourage the child to learn in the modern world.

l 5 Effective Teaching Strategies For The Classroom

The classroom is a dynamic environment, bringing together students from different backgrounds with various abilities and personalities. Being an effective teacher therefore requires the implementation of creative and innovative teaching strategies in order to meet students’ individual needs. As a teacher there is no ‘one size fits all’ solution, so here is a range of effective teaching strategies I use to inspire my classroom practice.

1. Visualization                      

2. Cooperative learning

3. Inquiry-based instruction

4. Differentiation

5. Technology in the classroom

l READING

In reading we are focusing on a three step approach to help encourage your child to be a fluent 2nd language reader and speaker.

First we inroduce the common sight words that are necessary due to their high frequency in the English language, second we do not just teach these words in isolation but we use them in common sentences to provide the necessary clues on the identification and understanding of these key words.

Second we also are using Phonics sounds focusing first on the short sounds with progression to the long vowel sound and understand how the same letter can have more than one sound and then again apply them to real world sentences. Included in learning phonics we also look at word families to help identify that there are many similar sounding words in English.

Third, we focus on reading stories in different areas to encourage intrest in reading and to apply the learning of sight words and phonics in learning to read and understand English as a second language.

l PHYSICAL EDUCATION

In the class of physical education we are engaged in doing group and individual activities to encourage several areas.

1st we are focused on improving the childrens phyical health through doing activities that engage running and other physical skills which include jumping and body and hand to eye coordination.

Activites are done with meeting the standards of China's health and physical activity standards.