Category: General

Congratulations on another successful year! Being a teacher is one of the greatest gifts and it is usually the students’ words at this time of year that remind me of the important impact that we have everyday. When I asked the students about their teacher, Ms. Duong, this is what they had to say:

“She is really caring and kind. She doesn’t leave anyone out and includes everybody. She always treats everyone equally. She is a joyful teacher and when she came, she told us she was nervous but she did a really great job! I learned a lot from her and she told us all the time that we are the best class. She brought us up and treated us well like we were one of her children so that we could be our best person.”

“She was really inspiring and every day when we saw her she had a big smile on her face and it made us smile as well. She would always let us know how great we are and that made us feel really happy.  She inspired us to become more involved and join more clubs. She also made really fun projects for us to do. “

“She is really sarcastic and can joke around with us. She also gives us fun activities to do. She made a lot of jokes in class and made me feel very happy. “

“She made me feel happy.”

“She always inspired me to be myself and made us feel comfortable. She made us feel happy and had a lot of smiles and always had a positive attitude. She always made anyone sad feel better and she taught everyone in such a respectful and caring way. We had a very active and fun class which helped us be motivated!”

“She is super caring and she treats everyone in the class equally. She never puts one student before another. She is super fun and makes learning fun! She makes games and even her tests are fun because they have jokes. She is always happy and even when she is stressed she finds the humour in the day. The classroom never has a negative vibe.”

“She does a lot of fun things. She doesn’t get agitated over little things. She is really honest with us about situations. She makes learning fun and joyful and funny. She lets us watch things a lot which we really like. She does community circles which helps us solve problems and also share about our weekends and our lives.”

I know that many of your students feel the same way about you! Thank you for all the work that you do every day to help our students of Ontario be the best people that they can be!

“Booksnaps” are visual responses to texts that students are reading.  When I first saw #BookSnaps on Twitter I was a little confused.  There were a lot of “Bitmojis” and “emojis” pasted on pictures of text.  My understanding was that the students were providing a personal reaction to the books that they were reading.  I certainly liked the idea of responding to books in a visual way using technology, but I wanted my students to go deeper than just pasting emojis onto pictures of books. As a class, we came up with a list of when it would be appropriate to create a #Booksnap and then created the success criteria together to make our #Booksnaps something that others would be interested in reading.

When to #Booksnap

An interesting or exciting part in the story.

Information or a fact from a Non-Fiction book that you found particularly interesting.

At the beginning of the book when you would like to make a prediction.

A personal reaction to something that has happened in the story.

A book recommendation when you have completed reading the book.

To identify and react to the problem in the story.

To identify and react to the main idea in the story.

To identify and react to the setting description in the story.

#Booksnap Success Criteria 

Balanced design between pictures and text.

Text is written clearly and is easy to read.

Title and author are included (source).

Includes a personal reaction and evidence from the text.

In our class we have used Seesaw  to create #Booksnaps but find that Pic Collage is much easier to edit and make changes and it has a few more bells and whistles for choices in texts and backgrounds.  Here are a few more samples of the work that students have created.  All of the samples that I have included here are from grade four students.

When students finish the #Booksnaps they post them to their account in Seesaw and I also airdrop them to myself and then put them on Twitter under my class account with the #Booksnaps and share on our school Twitter account.  Sharing these responses and getting feedback makes the learning authentic and meaningful for students.  The students are excited to create book responses in this format and they keep amazing me with new and interesting ways to interact with their texts.

I just wanted to share about an exciting digital tool I have been trying for a few months now. Google classroom is an organized way of creating a document on google drive and then having it available on google for all your students to use. Google classroom can create a separate copy for each student as if you have printed them all off their own copy. This helps the environment and is awesome if you have a supply in or did not save time to photocopy.

The great feature about this program is once a student “turns in” their work, you can submit their mark to them online. You just add the mark in the mark column and then they get it back in their google classroom accounts.

I am hoping one day to use this for all assignments but for now, it was great to use for a grade 7/8 writing assignment as they used their typing skills to help get their ideas down faster. They also stayed organized and it was my way of ensuring all documents were turned it at the end of class.

Another feature includes the students not being able to re-open their document until the teacher has added their mark. They can turn it in again if they need to change something but only after it has been graded the first time. Since it is turned it at the end of class, students cannot add anything at home.

To use this program, look in to your google classroom account and simply click “Create Class”. I promise you will all love this paperless tool! 

With the shift towards inquiry based learning in Kindergarten, I’ve seen some really wonderful things happening in classrooms. Teaching to the interest of the children opens doors to some really authentic, meaningful learning and quite honestly makes our job pretty fun. Educators have the ability to cater their program towards certain interests and often get quite creative in bringing these interests to life in their learning environments.

When classes get right into an inquiry, it can completely take over the classroom. Dramatic play centres are turned into elaborate submarines, dinosaur museums, space stations – you name it! Almost all areas of the classroom get retrofitted to go with the inquiry: the sensory bin, the library book selections, literacy materials, the block centre, and so on. All of these things are wonderful, but I find myself wondering a few things.

At what point does an inquiry become dangerously close to being a theme?

Kindergarten educators have a guilty pleasure for theme based teaching. It’s easy, it’s organized, it makes sense, it follows rules, it’s pretty and it all matches! It just makes sense that we have a harvest inquiry in the fall and a plants inquiry in the spring, but do they come about authentically or because we secretly want them to? We need to be careful not to turn our inquiries into themes.

Why? Themes aren’t meeting the needs of all of our learners. When we start an inquiry based on the observation of a few students displaying an interest, we’re doing a wonderful job meeting their particular needs and encouraging their learning. What about those few (or sometimes more than a few) students in our class that aren’t really interested in insects, arctic animals, structures, flight or whatever it happens to be? Sure, they will benefit from the exposure and probably take part, but for them the time spent during that inquiry isn’t as valuable as it could be.

An illustration of this is when we’d spent hours creating an intricate veterinarian’s office dramatic play centre and many students turned it back into a home living area whenever they used the space. This is mostly, I think, because they didn’t know how to take on the roles in a veterinarian’s office, but also because they weren’t really interested in that and just wanted to role-play home living like they’re naturally inclined to. Perhaps we build these beautiful inquiry related areas in addition to their usual dramatic play area, and not instead of?

This leads me to my second thought. We know that we have a diverse group of students with a variety of interests, levels of understanding and learning needs.

Why does everyone need to participate in the same inquiry, all at once? 

Children could participate in inquiries with small groups or individually! This is something I have been trying to encourage in my classroom and I’ve been finding great results. Students are more motivated and engaged in their day’s work [play]. We currently have a few inquiries on the go: some learning about the ocean, some about flight/airplanes, some about otters, some about hockey teams and one student who is individually researching The Tragically Hip. Again, got to love Kindergarten!

I’m not saying that whole group inquiries don’t hold value, because they certainly do when every child is engaged by them. We’ve had some wonderful experiences with the entire class engaged in the same topic for extended amounts of time this year. Our inquiry on music was a very rich experience and all of our students were genuinely interested in some way. I’m saying that whole group is not the only way to do inquiry.

Opening doors to more than one inquiry at a time will open the doors to more authentic and meaningful learning for all students. Yes, it will be messy and scattered and unorganized. For some, it might be a step out of a comfort zone but isn’t that what learning is supposed to be?