Reprinted January 2019
An accomplished and dedicated educator and now author, Patricia Lewis is considered an asset in the field of education, a field that has been part of her life for more than 45 years. These hard-working and dedicated years can be summarized as follows:
- Classroom Experience, 17 years
- Elementary Assistant Principal, 9 years
- Principal (at present), 21 years
Throughout her years at the Instituto Episcopal San Cristóbal, she was able to gather a wealth of experience to support her writings. One of the most important tasks was having to choose or decide on the best textbook to be used in the different levels. Also, she is a consultant/presenter (at workshops, conventions, and seminars), and member of the Board of Directors and former President of the Panama Chapter of TESOL (Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages). She has attended more than 250 workshops and conferences, all of these experiences have provided her with a broad framework of references.
Her years of professional and personal growth include earning several degrees and certificates of participation and/or of merit: Bachelor of Arts with a Major in Education, University of Panama; Master of Arts with a Major in Linguistics, Nova University; Second Language Acquisition; and her latest two: Doctor of Education in English Second Language and Doctor in Education from the University of Los Angeles.
Being an advocate for language teaching, language acquisition, and language learning, she maintains a constant search for the best language teaching methods. In this search, she found TPRS (Teaching Proficiency Through Reading and Storytelling), which she considers is the most effective method that can be used for developing language competence and fluency in students today.
To continue perfecting the method, she has attended seven National TPRS Conferences held in the United States and has been part of the Planning Committee for three TPRS Panama Chapter Conferences in Panama City. She plans to continue perfecting the implementations of this method, in order to help improve the way second languages are taught in Panama.
Currently, Patricia Lewis is the principal of Instituto Episcopal San Cristóbal. She has been the recipient of many outstanding awards and medals for her hard work in the community and in education, namely: The Vasco Núñez de Balboa and Manuel José Hurtado Medals of Honor in 2003 and 2008, respectively.
Professor Lewis is the author of various ESL books: An A to Z Adventure at the Zoo Student’s Workbook, An A to Z Adventure at the Zoo Short Readings, My First English Adventure Student’s Workbook, and the series TPRS New English Adventure (from levels one to six). All of these educational publications are accompanied by a step-by-step teacher’s manual and several visual aids, as illustrated big books for storytelling, flash cards, and audio compact discs with poems and songs.
The text My First English Adventures includes a series of action-filled activities to develop all of the eight learning intelligences; which will help students increase learning abilities. The abilities to be developed are distributed into three areas which are: the cognitive or linguistic, the social affective, and the psychomotor. The cognitive or linguistic area promotes verbal-linguistic intelligence, logic-mathematics intelligence, naturalistic, and visual-spatial intelligence.The social-affective area promotes the development of intrapersonal and interpersonal intelligence, and also musical intelligence. Finally, the psychomotor area which, we have divided into gross motor skills and fine motor skills, takes care of the kinesthetic intelligence and the development of creativity.
The text consists of ten thematic units, providing material for each month of the school year. The units present high-interest vocabulary and language structures, which are repeated in the units that follow. Repetition is a technique that helps students internalize the study material. It also helps students develop confidence and competence with the language by building on what they already know.
The units are also divided into seven or eight lesson plans Each lesson plan is preceded by an initial phase which, creates connections, motivates, justifies the educational action, generates comments, expectations and attitudes. The initial phase is a process of exploration warm up, revision of ideas and learned content. At this phase, the teacher includes the daily actions, reviews concepts, sings songs, says poems, and introduces the new material.
The Teacher’s Guide includes ten teaching units divided into, lessons to be developed throughout the school year. The content of each lesson will be developed in three areas: cognitive-linguistic, affective and psychomotor. Each area will have its respective objectives and activities which are integrated lo facilitate learning. The student’s text also has ten units divided into lessons with related material to reinforce learning. Each lesson will have two or three interpersonal activities; one of these will be a homework assignment. The purpose of the homework assignment is to promote child-parent relationships, permit parents to help with their child's fine motor skills development, and also to permit teachers to have more time for audio and visual development in class.
An added feature to the text is the "Show and Tell" activity. This section is included with the purpose of helping students to review the concepts studied and learned, and also to promote usage of the language. Students will use the concepts as they describe the things they see.
Audio program: There will be a tape or CD that will include all the songs and poems that are included in the book. The tape or CD will be organized according to the sequence of units, to allow teachers to locate each unit easily.
Visual cards: There will be picture flashcards to help with vocabulary and to reinforce the development of oral and visual discrimination. These flashcards may also be used to promote games and reinforce the vocabulary taught.
Some activities for the development of these skills will be included in our text. We will not include too many because our pre-kinder four-year-old students spend a lot of time developing these skills in their Spanish classes. Therefore, we will suggest that these activities be prepared sparingly in the English classrooms, since the time allotted is shorter than the hours spent in Spanish classes.
Spatial relationship: With this ability children are able to place themselves and the things around them in their respective space.
As children develop their spatial relationships, they will observe that there are differences in sizes; they learn to locate each part of the body; to see that there are things in front and behind them, and there are things on their left and right sides. A child needs to be spatially-situated in order to learn to read using left-to-right progression, write between the lines, draw a picture, and do math.
When a child has spatial relationship problems, he may not be able to concentrate on his work, nor write on a lined sheet of paper, nor respect the order and position of letters and numbers.
The student’s text will include a few spatial relationship activities, and a greater number of suggestions will be included in the Teacher’s Guide. The reason is, that spatial activities are mainly kinesthetic, thus the teacher will be able to relate cognitive concepts with activities that involve the whole body, and at the same time help the student’s memory.
This book is targeted to four-year-old pre-schoolers, who are probably being introduced to the formal process of teaching and learning Teachers who work with this age group need to know as much as possible about them so that, as we develop the process of teaching and learning, the students will be able to develop most of their abilities successfully and effectively.
Who are these pre-schoolers? What kind of characters are they? They are the very imaginative, spontaneous, and short-attention span gang, who love to listen to themselves, experiment with words, like to ask a million questions and kill us with the why's. They are critical about things, are attention seekers, and their perception is very globalized (they see the whole before the parts).
How do they learn? According to brain research, there are two essential things which make learning effective at any age: affectivity and meaningfulness. Affectivity relies on students feeling loved and secure in their surroundings. Meaningfulness depends on prior knowledge in order for students to make necessary connections. Learning does not take place without their connecting the new to the old.
Teachers in the 21st Century, need to take into the classroom the wealth of information that will enhance their classes; such as learning styles, multiple intelligences, and learning based on the latest information about brain research.
There are three basic learning styles identified which are: the visual, the auditory, and the kinesthetic style. Most pre-schoolers tend to bring these three learning styles to the classroom, but learning also depends on the learner's five senses. Therefore, teachers need to stimulate and motivate the students to use their senses to the fullest degree.
Multiple intelligence is a theory proposed by Howard Gardener in 1983 He claimed that everyone has at least eight intelligences that can be developed throughout our life span to help us excel in our abilities. By developing multiple intelligence activities, we are stressing on these three learning styles.
Information gathered from brain research made by Patricia Wolfe in her book Brain Matters: Translating Research into Classroom Practice says: "affective and meaningful classes breed effective classroom actions". Classes must be highly kinesthetic as well, since approximately 85% of our students are kinesthetic learners.
Pre-school teachers must understand and master the use of terms, such as gross and fine motor skills, spatial relationship, motor-visual coordination, auditory memory, visual memory, visual reception and association, auditory reception, and association and verbal expression.
A working knowledge of the above-mentioned terms is necessary because it forms part of the vocabulary in class planning and development at the preschool level. In our text, we will also include the area of psychomotor development, where we will divide the activities into gross motor skills and fine motor skills. The information provided in this section of the book is intended to stress the importance of the development of the above-¬mentioned skills.
Gross motor skills
They are the necessary skills for coordinating all body movements. For example, to be able to walk, we must be able to coordinate all the movements of the feet with the arms and maintain a balance Through the gross motor skills, children begin exploring their surroundings as they begin to learn about themselves. These skills are the basis upon which many other complex activities are developed (writing, walking, coordination) to mention a few gross motor skills.
If a child has not developed his (her) gross motor skills, he (she) may have problems with spatial relationships, he (she) may not have an adequate image of his (her) body, and he (she) may feel uncomfortable when playing with other children, as well as he (she) may have problems coordinating the fine motor movements necessary to develop his (her) writing ability.
As mentioned previously, the development of gross motor skills are essential at age four; therefore, students should be given opportunities to crawl, run, jump and climb. They should also learn to handle a ball with dexterity, and intentional activities to develop arm control at the shoulder, elbow, wrist and the fingers.
Fine motor skills development
These are psychomotor skills that begin with the gross motor skills - (the movement of the body is spaced, moves on to other body movements, and ends with the movement of hands and fingers). It refers to the ability to coordinate the movements of the hands with what is seen. It is called hand-eye coordination.
For example, in order for a student to copy a drawing from the board, the student must be able to perceive the picture, coordinate his hand movements to hold the pencil and draw the picture adequately. In other words, be able to coordinate eye with hand motor skills.
Hand and eye coordination is necessary for doing any type of manual work; sewing, knitting, cutting, pasting, working on puzzles, mechanical work, constructing, drawing, copying and writing.
Fine motor skill development should also be given special attention at age four because whatever is achieved at this age, will determine the child’s fine motor skills for the rest of his (her) life. It means his (her) handling of pencils, pens, scissors and how he (she) writes, draws, etc. How can teachers help with the development of such skills? They need to provide opportunities for students to use their fingers in tasks such as lacing and unlacing shoes, buttoning and unbuttoning clothes, putting puzzles together, puncturing holes in paper, practicing strokes and so on.
Auditory memory
It is the ability to remember what one has heard in the appropriate sequence or order.
It is important to develop auditory memory, because learning depends on prior knowledge and a child who has difficulty remembering what he (she) has heard will have difficulty speaking because speaking requires that, we remember words and their meanings. Also, if a child has difficulty remembering what he (she) hears in the appropriate order or sequence, he (she) will have difficulty in learning to count, add, multiply, follow instructions, remember what he (she) reads and what he (she) studied in school. These are obviously great difficulties, which will hamper the learning process.
In our text, teachers will work on this skill as they work with oral and written instructions given in the book, and as they teach the new concepts, new vocabulary, songs, stories, poems, sounds and names of letters in class. Teachers must observe keenly the attention span of the students and their immediate memory development.
Visual memory
It is the ability to remember things in their appropriate sequence.
Children need to develop visual memory because it is necessary for them to learn to write and spell words. If a child has difficulty remembering the visual order of things, he (she) will have difficulty in remembering the order of the letters in words, he (she) will also have difficulty remembering how to write letters and numbers in sequence, as well as drawings and illustrations that may require an order.
Our text will include exercises to develop visual memory and reinforce concepts and thematic vocabulary.
Perception and visual discrimination
This is the ability to distinguish among the many sounds someone hears. It implies that a child must be able to discover differences and similarities in sounds and words, in order to be able to use them in speech production.
A child who lacks auditory discrimination skills, could have problems paying attention, following instructions, writing and reading, and learning a second language.
Attention will be given to the development of perception and visual discrimination, this as we work with minimal pairs, production of sounds, pronunciation of words, phrases, and sentences. The mentioning of points and manner of articulation is an input for teachers, as they teach the sounds of the letters.
Visual reception and association
Visual reception is the ability to understand what you see and visual association is the ability to relate the visual stimulus that you see with previous images.
A child with difficulties grasping what he sees, will not be able to understand the meaning of many drawings or pictures, letters or written words. Sometimes a child may be able to understand the meaning of things, but cannot place them into categories; he (she) will then have difficulty to interpret what he (she) reads or what is expressed in an arithmetic exercise.
Practices for categorizing and grouping will be included in the text, in order to address the development of this skill.
Auditory reception and association
Auditory reception is the ability to understand what you hear, and auditory association is the ability to relate concepts and words that you hear and use. This ability will help a child to generalize and understand abstract concepts.
A child with difficulties in comprehension will not be able to understand the meaning of words, stories, songs, and instructions.
A child may be able to understand what he (she) has heard, but will not be able to categorize those concepts that are related; thus, the child's capacity to learn will be very slow.
Our text will include exercises to develop students' memory and also help students to remember new concepts as they associate and categorize the exercises in their respective groups.
Verbal expression
This is the ability to express ideas orally, it is a combination of correct pronunciation of words and the use of such words and ideas to express language appropriately.
A child with difficulties in this skill, will lack the ability to use language appropriately, or to learn a second language easily.
"A Show and Tell What You See" section of the text will give teachers the opportunity to work on this skill.
The skills mentioned above are those that are needed to be developed in our four-year-old students. Many of our students have already matured in these skills. How? In some cases, because of their home environment or because they have been through several pre-school levels, or because of older siblings. Nevertheless, the pre-kinder teacher needs to be aware of these concepts so that they may be included in the teacher’s working plans and in the teaching and learning process. This realm of knowledge will also help the teachers to be aware of some of the handicaps or hardships students may be facing in the classroom. Finally, our objective is for the teacher to try to help the students as much as possible to overcome any of the difficulties mentioned, and that each teacher masters the skills that will enable him (her) to understand students' capabilities as they move or mature to the next learning level.
My First English Adventure is a reality, thanks to the dedication and sharing of talents of the following persons:
Lic. Sheila Henson Art Director
Lic. Lorena De León Graphic Designer
Lic. Eduardo Mosquera Cover Artist
Prof. Sislyn Benson Proofreader
Lic. Jeanette Erina Proofreader
Lic Brenda Harris Proofreader
Prof Marcela Dickens Proofreader
Yolanda Peters Proofreader
Sister Gloria Lewis Proofreader
Jamala Jones Proofreader
Lic Tyrone Peters Proofreader
Sec. Mitzy Smith Typist
Sec. Fulvia Mayorga Assistant Typist
Prof. Rosario de Oliva Preschool Experiences
Prof. Berta de Martínez Preschool Experiences
Prof. Teresa Redway Preschool Experiences
Michael Jordan Inspiration
Justin Jordan Inspiration
Prof. Edmundo Lewis Motivation
Prof. Aleida Amado Preschool Experiences
