Category: General

I am very excited about Canada celebrating its sesquicentennial anniversary this year! There are so many fun activities and a feeling of celebration everywhere you go in our amazing country.

To gear up to a big celebration in June, we have been doing small activities every month as a school to get pumped up.

Last week in our assembly, I made up a 150 second challenge that my whole school participated in together. I put a large 150 second countdown timer on the wall and then took students on a tour across the whole country, through our actions and imaginations, before the 150 seconds were finished.

Below are the actions and activities that we did to start to celebrate our amazing country!

1. Go skating on the Rideau canal in Ottawa
2. Go skiing in Whistler BC.
3. Climb a mountain in Banff national park in Alberta
4. Go fishing in Northern Saskatchewan
5. Shovel your driveway in Winnipeg, Manitoba
6. Paddle your canoe in Algonquin Park in Ontario
7. Eat some poutine in Quebec
8. Go dog sledding in the Northwest Territories
9. Watch the Northern Lights in the Yukon
10. Ride a snowmobile in Nunavut
11. Dance an Acadian jig in New Brunswick
12. Wave to my family in PEI
13. Catch a lobster in Nova Scotia
14. Go whale watching in Newfoundland
15. Roll up the rim in Ottawa

 

 

Getting students going on the Creative Process can take some thoughtful planning on the part of the teacher. Students are sometimes stuck for ideas and need someone to provide them with a catalyst for inspiration. The chart above is directly from the Ontario Curriculum for the Arts, and gives some great ideas for how to challenge and inspire student creations.

Recently, in my grade 3 and 4 art classes, I decided that I was going to try a new idea for inspiring creations and see how students responded to a new type of stimulus. I gave them some quotes about inclusion and equity to choose from, and their job was to create an art piece that represented what the quote meant to them. The tricky part was getting them going on their pieces and providing them with support and an environment that would produce the artwork that I knew that they were capable of.

Using the above chart as a guide, I followed the suggestions when trying to inspire my students creations:

Introduce the initial idea, challenge, stimulus, inspiration and experience

Introducing this art piece to my students was tricky. They really needed to get their brains turned onto the issues of equity and inclusion before we tried to analyze our quotes or come up with imagery for our art pieces. I started by reading them the story of Viola Desmond from the book “Viola Desmond Won’t Be Budged”. (The book is very easy to understand for all students, and Viola’s sister was in Toronto a couple of weeks ago, so the students had some familiarity with the story). This got the students thinking about racial segregation and asking thoughtful questions about Viola’s experiences. I introduced the quotes to them and encouraged questions or collaboration with others to reflect on the meaning of the quote that they chose. I even had some students bring in their own quotes. I gave them a graphic organizer with some questions on it to help to get them started reflecting on their pieces. The completion of a graphic organizer also allowed me a chance to see who needed additional inspiration or support before they started their art.

Provide models, examples and learning goals

As a class, we looked at the Peel District School Board art display for Black History Month on Twitter where many other students had used a variety of images to convey messages. We analyzed what we thought made particular pieces powerful and artistically appealing.

Establishes expectations, defines parameters and help develop criteria for success

Before we started our pieces, we talked through our criteria for successful completion of the art project. The students and I used Anne Davies process for co-creating a success criteria which can be found in the book “Setting and Using Criteria”.

 

The graphic organizer that I gave to students included the following questions:

My quote is:

 

In my own words, this means:

 

The symbols or images that this quote makes me think of are:

 

 

 

 

The mood I want to create in my art is:

 

 

The colours I will use are:

 

 

The focus of my piece (where I want people to look) is:

 

 

Some examples of the art with the quote that the students chose.

“Love is the only force capable of transforming an enemy into a friend.” – Martin Luther King Jr.

“I have decided to stick with love. Hate is too great a burden to bear”

– Martin Luther King Jr.

“It always seems impossible until it’s done.” – Nelson Mandela

 

 

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.