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There are so many realities of teaching, both wonderful and challenging, that don’t cross our minds until suddenly we find ourselves living them. We’ve all gone through the B.Ed certification, taught as Teacher Candidates, taken the AQ courses, memorized the buzz words, read the books… the list goes on and on. All of these things are there to prepare us for teaching, though I’m now determined that nothing truly prepares us until we’re actually doing it.

I’m currently in my second LTO position teaching a grade 2/3 class and I’m learning new things every single day. For anyone else starting their careers like me, I want to share some some of the most important things I have learned so far.

 

Suddenly, it’s all on me. This was a daunting realization but so exciting at the same time. I’m the one responsible for the well-being, success and learning of my students. This is it, this is the real deal.

There is so much more for me to learn. Just when I think I’ve learned so much, I’m quickly reminded about how much I don’t know yet. This is overwhelming for me, as someone who strives to do the best at everything I do. The only way to learn some things is by experiencing them, and I know that with my own years of teaching experience, this wisdom will come.

Much of my first year of teaching will be spent learning how to do things while doing them for the first time. Prime example of this? My first time writing report cards.  Report cards were only one of the many “firsts” that I’ve had this year. This is, in my opinion, the hardest part of being a new teacher. There are so many things we are expected to just know and do that we have never known and never done.

I will have many moments of pride and confidence, but also moments of uncertainty. There have been moments that I’ve felt on top of the world. I’ve had moments of feeling like I’m doing what I was born to do, that I know I’m doing amazing things with my students, and truly feeling that I’m making a difference. There have also been moments of, and I quote, “I have no idea what I’m doing”.

Many things will not go as I planned them. Something that I love most about teaching is that no two days are ever, even remotely, the same. I’ve spent hours planning wonderful lessons and experiences for my students that have completely been derailed by the unexpected – fire drills, forgotten assemblies, tired students, you name it. I’ve learned that my ability to be a good teacher is not only based on pedagogy and planning, but on my flexibility, my open mind, my ability to embrace change and my ability to laugh it off.

It’s more than okay to ask for help. I’m lucky to have worked in two wonderful schools so far with supportive administrators, colleagues and support staff. I think new teachers can all be a bit apprehensive to ask for help at first – we want to prove we can do it ourselves. It’s so important to ask for help from those around you. Experienced teachers have years of wisdom to impart and wasting any opportunity to learn from them is wasted potential for me.

There is no such thing as “being caught up”. Finished marking? More coming my way! Wrapping up a unit? Time to plan the next one! Organized the bookshelf? It’s been two hours and it needs done again! These things will fill my to-do list for the rest of my career. Some items on my list will be small, like organizing bookshelves, and some will be big and important. What is just as important is to take time for myself. There will always be a to-do list looming over me at the end of the day, but taking time for myself and my own well-being is non-negotiable. I’ll be a better teacher for it, too.

It’s impossible to do everything I told myself I’d do. I’ve spent the better part of my life thinking up wonderful things to do with my classroom and my students. My Pinterest board is over-loaded with things I want to do – everything from making adorable reading nook furniture to engaging my students in global initiatives. I’ve learned that it is okay that not all of these things will happen. I’ve learned to prioritize and put my energy where it is most important. Sometimes all my wonderful ideas will have to take the back seat to other things, like eating and sleeping.

Despite all of this, I will never work a day in my life. This is the best thing I’ve learned about this career and about myself. I absolutely love doing this. The late nights, the endless hours of learning while doing, the never ending to-do list, the discouraging moments – they’re not work. They’re a part of being a teacher and making a difference.

 

My arts space is all about sharing who you are, what you think and what you like. I have a standing invitation to any student in all of my classes to share a song, poem, instrument, story or dance that they have learned in their home or community. In the last couple of weeks I have had one of my new students from Spain teach us a hip-shaking Spanish dance, another student teach us a song in Punjabi, and another student demonstrate the beginning of a Bollywood song on a xylophone. It is a great way to start a class and a great way to encourage others in the class to be the teacher. It also helps build our community as a group of artistic collaborators. As the students share over the year, I bring in a song that my dad wrote when I was a kid and share some of my own culture as well. I come from an East Coast family where humour is an important part of the arts.

Yesterday in class, a student came in and told me that she had been practicing a song at home and wanted to share it with the class. She played the song and the students in the class quickly realized that it was a song they recognized. One student gleefully said “This is the apple pen song.” I had no idea what they were talking about but quickly realized that every student in this grade 3/4 split class knew exactly what the apple pen YouTube phenomenon was all about.  They all had seen the video and loved the silly song. Using their excitement to enhance music class, we wrote songs using the rhythm of the song as our inspiration.  They quickly worked on their own lyrics and wrote a melody that they could play on the recorder. They were creating with happiness and energy and in 30 minutes everyone had created their own lyrics and melody to the song.

It was a great lesson in getting to know my students and using their interests as an inspiration for their creations.

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Creating our very own version of the “Apple Pen” song:

 

As we were walking into the forest last week, one of my students commented that he didn’t like winter. I asked him if he enjoyed tobogganing and building snow forts and he said, “Yes, but I don’t like getting dressed for winter. All I want to do is to wear shorts and a tshirt and my shoes so I can go outside and play.” I couldn’t argue with that.

Getting kindergarten students dressed in snowpants, boots, coats, hat and mitts (why would anyone think that gloves were a good idea for 4 year olds?) is a regular cause of frustration for kindergarten educators as well as for their charges, without a doubt. I remember seeing a meme someone had posted with a photo of a bear, its mouth wide open in a roar. The caption beneath the photo read, “MITTS! ON! LAST!” Clearly a joke best understood by those of us who have lived through the chaos of dressing a group of little ones in wintertime.

There’s no getting around the fact that we live in a wintery country where, for at least for 4 months of the year, it is necessary to wear warm layers of clothing. When winter weather hits, it is definitely time to read Robert Munsch’s hilarious story, ‘Thomas’ Snowsuit’ as a way to acknowledge the fact that getting dressed in winter is a pain, but that, if you want to play outside with your friends, you have to be dressed properly. It takes a great deal of organization, support and (sigh) patience to get a whole crew of kinders dressed to go outside so that at least they will be warm and dry, and at most, they are protected from getting frostbite. It is understood that a few lessons on how to dress and regular reminders are part of the job for kindergarten educators. This is especially important for those students who are new Canadians and whose families may be unfamiliar with the best ways to dress their children warmly.

On a good day, a child may take an average of 10 minutes to get ready to go outside, and thankfully, we all have a handful of students who are ahead of the game when it comes to independence and self-regulation. And then… there is the rest of the class. It is a wonder that we manage to get outside at all when there are a host of hurdles each day which inevitably delay our departure. There are the common hurdles such as individuals who are distracted from the task at hand (i.e. getting dressed NOW), or those who flatly refuse to get dressed. If you combine these personalities with: zippers that are wet or get stuck or are broken; mittens where the thumb liner won’t go back into the thumb; gloves (argh!); snow pants with snaps that won’t snap closed; pants that crawl up if not properly tucked into socks before putting snow pants on; and ‘lost’ mitts, hats, scarves, etc.; what you end up with is often described as the ‘herding kittens’ phenomenon.

We are lucky that we only have to go through the getting-dressed routine once a day, because our outdoor learning is first thing in the morning when the students arrive at school already dressed. That means having to only get dressed once at school for the play block at the end of the day. In the afternoon, when they do get dressed for outside, we dismiss students one at a time as they finish up an activity so that there will only be a few at a time in the cloak room rather than the whole crew. On the wall in the coat room are visuals for everyone to remember the order one gets dressed (snowpants on first…mitts on last), and we sing songs while students get dressed to help them stay focussed (“Put on your boots, your boots, your boots….let’s go outside…”). I have also found that sometimes you have to cajole and be creative to discover what strategy works with students who would rather wander around the classroom and continue to play instead of getting dressed. For instance, there is an SK student who, I discovered, is only motivated to get dressed if I time him (his record is 1 ½ minutes!) otherwise, he will use every delay tactic he can, even enticing others to join his boycott.

It is definitely not the part of day I most look forward to, but regardless of the time and effort, getting dressed independently, in winter or in summer, is one of those life skills that requires a lot of patience. Students are learning how to dress themselves so that they can be comfortable and warm while they play outside. The key is finding ways to make it as seamless (no pun intended) as possible for everyone involved while you wait for warm weather.

 

When grade one students start in my music class, we spend a lot of time engaging with and having fun interacting with music. We sing songs, play games and chant a lot of poems and stories. This action helps the students solidify the feeling of concepts such as beat or rhythm in their bodies and minds before we try and analyze it with proper notation. I use colour cards and we make up rhythms to colours such as blue, blue, purple, green. We have also created chants connected to holidays such as Santa, sleigh, reindeer, reindeer. Below is a lesson that I wrote to help my students create rhythms around Easter time last year. However, this lesson can be substituted with any time of the year, using any group of words that have one and two syllables such as sports, food, school subjects etc. 

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Title:  Bunnies and Eggs

Grade 1, Music

Time: 1-2 classes

Critical Learning
1. Two eighth notes (words with two syllables) are played more quickly than one quarter note (words with one syllable).

2. Two eighth notes and one quarter note each take up one beat. How many claps do we need with the word “bunny,” “egg,” etc.?

3. Which claps go faster, bunny or egg?

Curriculum Expectations
C1.  Creating and Performing: apply the creative process to create and perform music for a variety of purposes, using the elements and techniques of music.

C1.1 sing songs in unison and play simple accompaniments for music from a wide variety of diverse cultures, styles, and historical periods

C1.2 apply the elements of music when singing, playing, and moving

C1.3 create compositions for a specific purpose and a familiar audience

Learning Goals
At the end of this lesson, I can:

1. Rearrange words that represent quarter and eighth notes
2. Perform a 4 beat rhythm two times in a rondo form

Prior Knowledge and Skills

Keeping the beat to a variety of songs, poems and chants

Terminology

Ti-ti

Ta

Beat

Rhythm

Materials

Music K-8 Vol.17 no. 4 “Shaky, Shaky Egg”

Shakers

Minds On  

Show the students the foam bunny and egg and ask them what they think we will be singing about today?

Action! 

1.    Teach the students the song “Shaky, Shaky Egg.”

2.     As a class, put four foam bunnies and eggs on a music stand and ask the students to figure out how many shakes they need to match the words bunny and egg.  After students have discovered that you need one shake for egg and two for bunny, create a variety of ostinatos(repeated rhythms)  and practice them with the class.

3.    Put students into groups of four and give them four foam shapes ( a variety of eggs and bunnies). Assign each group a letter starting with B, C, D etc. Have each group practice shaking their rhythms with their shakers.

4.    In their groups students will make their own rhythm pattern and practice it.

Consolidation

Have the whole class perform a rondo with the song “Shaky, Shaky Egg” as the A part and each students rhythm as the B, C, D etc… part. The order of the performance will go A, B, A, C, A, D, A, E, A, F, etc.

Assessment

Assess students accuracy in playing their rhythm and ability to stay with the beat of the song

Differentiation (DI):

For students struggling, have them recite the words only for the rondo

To extend the activity, have students perform their rhythm with no words and using body percussion

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Here are some pictures of materials that I use in my class to teach rhythm to my grade 1 students: