Michelle Fenn 21st Century Learning, Behaviour Management, Building Inclusion, Challenging Topics, Classroom Management, Communication Tools, Constant Learning, Diverse Learning Needs, General, Inclusion, Inspiring Students, Inspiring Teachers, Making a Difference Through Education, Mental Health, Mindfulness, Professional Learning and Growth, Resources, self reflection, Teacher Appreciation, Teacher Wellness, Wellness, wellness

Daring Classrooms

I state the obvious when I say that teaching is a demanding job.  If you are reading this, you are most likely a teacher and this is not news to you.  I’d like to highlight a resource that feeds the soul of a teacher (and quite frankly a human being) while also providing some strategies for integrating that soul feeding into your classroom practice for your students.  Wait, what…that exists?  It is a website from Brene Brown called Daring Classrooms.  If you haven’t heard of her yet, you can find “The Call to Courage” on Netflix and/or her Ted Talk on Vulnerability.  She is inspirational in leadership, in life and in work.  Here is a snippet from her #DaringClassrooms website:

“Teachers are some of our most important leaders. We know that we can’t always ask our students to take off the armor at home, or even on their way to school, because their emotional and physical safety may require self-protection.

But what we can do, and what we are ethically called to do as teachers, is create a space in our schools and classrooms where all students can walk in and, for that day or hour, take off the crushing weight of their armor, hang it on a rack, and open their heart to truly being seen.

Teachers are the guardians of spaces that allow students to breathe and be curious and explore the world and be who they are without suffocation. Students deserve one place where they can rumble with vulnerability and their hearts can exhale.

And what I know from the research is that we should never underestimate the benefit to a child of having a place to belong—even one—where they can take off their armor. It can and often does change the trajectory of their life.

Teachers: Everyday should be Teacher Appreciation Day. I am so grateful for you and your willingness to show up and create brave, safe spaces where our children can learn, grow, and be seen.”

Some of the short (8-12 minute) video resources from Daring Classrooms include:

How do we avoid the pressure to please?

How do teachers manage oversharing?

How do we help parents understand failing as part of the learning process?

Does the word “disappointed” shame students?

In addition to the video resources there are free downloads for resources, parenting the classroom and daily life.  There are pdfs that you can print out for working with students.  My favourite one is the list of core emotions.  Sometimes when students have triggers they can’t always name or explain the emotion that caused the trigger in behaviour.  Being able to learn about the names and the definitions of core emotions is helpful for students to self-regulate.

Every year in a classroom brings new challenges.  In fact, every day in a classroom will bring on a new challenge.  I hope that as you lead your own #DaringClassroom you will find this resource helpful and that it may feed your teacher soul.

Laura Bottrell General

What Can We Learn From Halloween Candy?

Math talks encourage participation, nurture intuition, build fluency, and enhance mental math strategies. Most importantly, math talks improve students’ ability to justify and defend their thinking. In my own practice, this instructional strategy has been the most valuable window into my students’ thinking.

Sometimes the best math talks come from things that seemingly involve no math at all. One of my class’ favourite math activities is to play “Which One Doesn’t Belong?”, where students examine four pictures (or shapes, or numbers) side by side and must decide which one does not belong with the set, justifying their answers. These are open-ended, high-ceiling prompts with multiple access points which allow the teacher to meet students where they’re at in the conversation, and other students’ more complex thinking to challenge their peers. You can access these images for use in your own classroom here.

I want my students to see that math is everywhere in their lives. Taking a bit of a Kindergarten approach, I’ve been going out of my way to point out math concepts that occur naturally throughout our day. On Halloween, before sending them home for their night of trick-or-treating, I asked them what they usually do with their candy when they get back home. Most said that they dump it on the floor (of course!).

I asked, “well, what do you do next?”. About half of them shared that they sort or count their candy. We talked a little bit about the different ways that everyone usually sorts their candy. I invited them to have their families take a picture of their sorted candy piles and send it to me! They seemed pretty excited about their “candy homework”.

That night, almost all of the families in my class submitted a picture! The following day, I used their pictures for one of the most engaging and valuable math talks we’ve had this year.


We took our time looking at each of the submitted photos, noticing and naming math concepts that were visible in each one. Their best ideas came from my simple prompt, “What math can you see here?“. Some of the concepts and skills that we touched upon include:

Number Sense – subitizing, estimating (when a full set is visible and when parts of a set are buried – for example, what could be the answer when we can’t see what is underneath the pile?), counting, least/greatest, mental math addition and subtraction

Patterning – patterning by different attributes (shape, colour, kind of candy)

Measurement – measurement with non-standard units (the way we line up the candy along the floor affects how the quantity appears – for example, if the same amount of different sized bars are lined up touching one another, it may appear that there are more of the larger sized bars because they create a longer line)

Data Management – different rules for sorting and classifying, different ways of arranging the candy to make their thinking clear, discussions about the most and least popular types of candy given out

Geometry – sorting and classifying by geometric properties of the candy packaging (rectangular candy, square packages, spheres, 2D vs. 3D packaging, etc)

Our wonderfully rich math talk also lead us into a media literacy discussion about packaging, advertising and marketing, and why certain candy brands appeared to be more popular than others.

They had so much to share that we will have to continue on Monday!

 

Kelly.McLaughlin Assessment and Evaluation, Celebrating Success, Language Learning, Learning in a Real Life Context, Literacy

Halloween learning opportunity

During the past few weeks, my students have been writing short scary stories. They have been working in groups to create stories with creative characters, a strong plot and a problem that arises in their story. 

About a month ago, my students were thinking hard to plan for our first drama task of the year. Knowing Halloween was at the end of the month, they wanted to plan a Halloween task. They wanted to have some sort of haunted house that would involve all of the grade eight students. Unfortunately that wasn’t able to happen, but for the 30 students that did participate, they worked well to create an exciting final product. 

With my students help, what we ended up deciding on was that each scary short story would be performed in our class in the haunted house. We would present our scary short stories. Five stories ended up being brought to life. Each story had unique characters, a unique stage, audience setup and music soundtrack. For that reason, students who did not want to act helped in other ways such as stage crew, music creator or class collector. This short story project ended up turning into a show for six classes to view. 

Students decorated the room to their liking the day before towards the end of the day. They worked hard to set up a spooky setup that would work for everyone. A student in my colleagues class donated decorations for the entire project and the students had fun setting them up. A few days prior to decorating, two of my students went around to the grade five and six teachers and asked them to sign up for a viewing time. The classes would come on October 30th to view the five shows. 

The performances went very well! Students were evaluated on the writing of their stories for literacy as well as many drama expectations for their performances. They were marked on their ability to plan and shape the drama throughout their many performances and were also evaluated based on their ability to use the elements of drama. They did an amazing job telling each of their created stories to their peers. 

It was great to see such collaboration for this project as many students invited other actors into their group as they enjoyed writing a story that would include as many as up to ten actors. They let students audition for the part and then the show became their own as well. Teachers complimented the students on their amazing show creation and very well written stories. The kids had a great time and are excited to try something like this again during the winter holidays. I am so proud of my students for their collaboration skills during this project and their ability to take on such a large task. I am excited for their next opportunity to showcase their incredible leadership abilities and their group work skills.