Alison.Board Classroom Management, Inquiry, Learning in a Real Life Context, Year End Activities

Keeping them Engaged…

These last two months of school can be trying for both teachers and students. The students are ready to get outdoors and classroom management is necessary as their social volume seems to increase with each warmer day. People that are not working in education often suggest that I must enjoy these last weeks of school as I anticipate the summer. It is hard to explain how challenging the last two months can be. Teachers feel overwhelmed to complete marking, prepare themselves for the looming task of report writing, as well as make plans for their teaching placement in September! In addition to that, teachers want to feel that they are keeping their students engaged with learning into June, not just keeping them busy.

Here are some suggestions to try out in the last month of school that will actively engage your students, if you haven’t already:

  • Have students design an original book cover for a book they have read, with a new artistic representation (art, media) and a new summary (language) on the back. When completed, create a gallery walk or a contest for best original design. If completed with another class, you can swap covers to judge.
  • Allow students to work individually or in small groups to create a dance based on a specific theme, element, or cultural influence. Provide them time each day to work on it (they love this!), then use days in June for each group to present to the rest of the class (or even invite parents in for an Open House event).
  • Provide students with about 3 poems of different styles to read and reflect on. Allow time for group discussions and sharing of ideas. Create a poetry workshop for a few periods each week. Students can peer review or you can provide feedback. Students select their favourite original poem to read to the class. Or create a Poetry Cafe for parents or other students in the school to attend. Students will enjoy advertising, writing invitations, and preparing beverages for the Cafe!
  • Take your learning outside! Go on weekly walks in the community and look for connections to your current lessons/activities in Science, Social Studies, or Math. If students ask particular questions, use it a starting point for a mini-inquiry that you can support for the last month in the classroom. Document your walks with photos, written reflections, or drawings.
  • Find a purpose. Use the last two months to pursue something meaningful in the community that there may not have been time to do over the winter months. Adopt a school garden to care for, clean up in the community, or buddy up with younger/older students and work together.
Enjoy!
Photo of Erin G
Erin.Grewar Assessment, Differentiated Instruction, Diverse Learning Needs, Year End Activities

Le passé c’est brassé – Bring the Passé Composé to Life (Part 2)

               An important lesson that I’ve learned this year is have the students write in a concise manner. In the following assignment, La journée de …, students must basically incorporate most of the major things we covered in approximately 10 sentences (passé composé with avoir/être, singulier/pluriel, compound sentences and adverbs). Originally in past years, I used to do a similar project entitled “Une semaine dans la vie de …” which involved them describing the week in the life of someone using the same requirements but was more than double in length. With my senior classes, I’ve been focusing more on quality rather than quantity by teaching them how to expand and elaborate on simple ideas. Again, the shorter length requirement is more feasible for reluctant FSL writers but showing all your students how to achieve more complexity allows your more advanced students to still be challenged. I’ve attached the project guidelines and reference sheets for you to view. Hopefully, it might be useful for an end of the year assignment.

la journee de project guidelines

Les activités possibles – au passe

 

Photo of Mike Beetham
Mike Beetham Anti-bullying, Building Inclusion, Celebrating Success, Classroom Management, Differentiated Instruction, Year End Activities

Celebrations

“If it is worth doing, it is worth celebrating”. That component is a significant part of every classroom agreement that I am a part of. As my classroom community evolves it becomes a priority that best effort is all that can be asked of the students and the teacher. As such, we do not celebrate grades, we celebrate best effort. Each and every child in the room knows and understands that as long as they are working as hard as they can, the result is always worth celebrating.

That belief began to evolve in my teaching about twenty years ago when I first began to understand the role of diagnostic assessment and how important it is to start where my students are and not be driven by grade expectations. I can best sum it up by saying, it is the juncture in my career where I began to teach children and not deliver curriculae.  My students (and classroom) began to lose the competitive edge and shifted toward a cooperative learning environment with a focus on helping everyone be successful. A significant aspect to that change was the need to redesign what celebrations looked like.

C– classroom community social events (Thanksgiving lunch, special days)

E– everyone gets to share their work in a public forum

L – lots of trips to connect learning to real life scenarios

E– extra high fives, fist pumps, sunshine calls home, notes and oral praise

B – board filled with weekly awards

R– regular positive visits from principal, parents and other staff

A – always asking for input from classroom advisors on new ways to celebrate

T – teacher models and then a gradual release of responsibility

E– every effort big or small is worth celebrating

How do you celebrate the efforts of your students? I encourage you to post your ideas for others to read.

Photo of Erin G
Erin.Grewar Celebrating Success, Making a Difference Through Education, Year End Activities

Appreciating the Homeroom Teacher

Often, after having spent the year together, the impact of the homeroom teacher is substantial but oftentimes goes unstated or unsaid. That in no way means that students don’t appreciate the time, energy and efforts of their teachers but perhaps don’t always take the time to actually think about it and put it into words. As a rotary teacher, this is something I like to coordinate as a class. In one of the final classes, we make something simple out of origami and insert a little personalized note (see tulip pattern below). Before writing them, we take the time to discuss what makes a message meaningful vs. superficial. I give them the following sentence starters for those who might need some ideas.

I will always remember you for

I really appreciated the time when

A valuable life lesson you taught me was

Thanks a lot for

As a person, your best qualities are

For fun, we collected them all and put them into a report card envelope and gave them to the teacher just as she was about to distribute theirs. I know that as someone who invested a great deal of time and personal energy into her class, these messages will be greatly appreciated. For the students, it is a chance to communicate a heartfelt thought that might otherwise go unsaid.

http://www.papercraftsforchildren.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/origami-tulips.jpg

Photo of Erin G
Erin.Grewar Celebrating Success, Year End Activities

Connecting as a Class

After hopefully bonding together over the course of the year, it’s always nice to get the students to formally acknowledge/remininsce about how they bonded as a class.

One is a new one I’m going to try called Friendship Connections (source:Energize).

Materials:

  • Large ball of yarn and paperclip for each student

Directions:

  • Sit together in a large circle in an open grassy area and have students bend their paperclips into a V shape.
  • Ask students to think about something that they would like to remember about their experiences with the group. I’m going to give them a few options to think about if they need a little inspiration. (What experience did you enjoy the most? What’s an experience that brought you closer together as a group?)
  • Start by securing the end of the yarn in the ground with your bent paper clip and begin the discussion yourself. (Ex. I loved the day we spent on our walking tour of the Humber River and our group pumpkin carving contest.)
  • Roll the yarn to someone else, have them secure the yarn with their clip and make their statement.
  • Continue passing the yarn back and forth across the circle until everyone’s had a turn and the web is complete.

Variation for beginning of Year:

Precede this activity with another get to know you game and instead of standing up and reporting something about the person, you can use this type of forum.

Photo of Roz Geridis
Roz.Geridis Celebrating Success, Year End Activities

Class Appreciation

As the school year was coming to an end I was trying to think of an idea for the kids to show their appreciation of each other. Some students will be continuing together and some are moving on to a new school. As a class, we had completed a few activities using an electronic wordle program. It made me think about doing a wordle for each student as a class.

I had each student write his/her own name of the paper asking them to make an effort in the design, size or colours. The students then passed the paper one to the right and the new student wrote one word about that student. I asked for no repetitions and the wordle moved throughout the class so every student wrote something on each student’s wordle.  The last student sitting to the left of the student on the wordle brought the wordle to me. I then matted the wordle on a little background. Tomorrow, I will be presenting the wordles to every student. The students know this is coming and are very excited to see their own wordle.

A butterfly on a finger
Katie Pryde Celebrating Success, Diverse Learning Needs, Inquiry, Learning in a Real Life Context, Year End Activities

Life Cycles in Kindergarten

For the past few weeks, we have been exploring Life Cycles in my Kindergarten classroom. First, we started off by learning about plants. I read some stories to my class including The Tiny Seed, and we discussed how a plant is created. We also discussed the different parts of a plant. This lead in nicely to some discussions about various life cycles.

As a Kindergarten team, we ordered caterpillars (from Boreal) so that we could watch the life cycle of a butterfly occur.Our caterpillars will turn into Painted Lady Butterflies. We watched some youtube video clips so students could see what it was that would be happening in our classroom during this process. We also read a lot of various books, both Fiction and Non-Fiction, about butterflies. We were able to observe our tiny caterpillars turn into bigger, fatter caterpillars, form into their chrysalis and then into butterflies. The students really enjoyed seeing this process first had, authentic learning at its best! I allowed my students to have opportunities to observe and even read to the caterpillars. We also kept a butterfly journal, where students would record daily what stage it was in.

 

After a few days of having living butterflies, we were able to go outside and let our butterflies free into the environment. This also helped our Eco School status. Overall, my students really enjoyed this! They loved coming in each and every morning and checking on the progress. I would highly recommend any kindergarten teacher to use this in their classrooms! It was also a wonderful tool to use at the end of the year when the students are a bit “over” being at school. I felt that by studying the life of a butterfly was able to keep their excitement and engagement right up until the end of the year.

we made it
Carmen.Oliveira Celebrating Success, Literacy, Students as Teachers, Year End Activities

Celebrating Learning as the Year Winds Down

As our school year winds down, I thought I’d share a few ideas I’ve used in the past along with some I’ve recently come across that can create fun and meaningful opportunities to reflect on the learning and  overall experience in our classrooms this year.

END OF YEAR BOOKLET: This booklet is geared toward junior students but can easily be modified for primary grades.  This booklet is a way for students to think back on the various aspects of their year and includes tasks that involve creativity by adding artwork.  Students enjoy reading each others’ booklets and sharing them with the class at a year-end party.

END OF YEAR AWARD: Students create their own award to present to anyone they wish.  They decide what the award is celebrating and the recipient can be someone in the class, the school, their family, or community.  You can make it fun by having students draw each others’ names and create an award for their classmate which they present at an end-of-year award ceremony.  This often becomes very humourous with some silly awards being created.

TEACHER REPORT CARD: I can understand why some teachers would be wary of having their students do this but I actually find it very helpful and the students love giving me feedback.  I spend so much of the year assessing them and sharing descriptive feedback about their learning so why shouldn’t they do the same with respect to my teaching?  Students are quite insightful and honest.  Some of the reports I’ve received have been eye-openers and got me thinking about how to better my program the following year.

LETTER TO NEXT YEAR’S STUDENTS: This gives the current students the opportunity to reflect on their year and think of advice to give to the students for the upcoming school year.  Both the students writing the letter and those reading it the following year really enjoy this opportunity to get a sense of what can be expected.

LET STUDENTS TEACH A CLASS: You can split the class into groups and assign each a specific topic you studied this year. Give them time to go over their topic and invent a good review activity, which they have to grade (or not, if it’s too much for the end of the year). You assess them on whether they were able to re-teach the concept or skill and how effective their review activity is.

STUDENT CREATED QUIZ SHOW: Have students come up with questions for a quiz show about concepts, skills, facts, or anything they learned throughout the year.  Create categories (ie. like Jeopardy) for each subject area and have students organize their questions.  Enjoy the quiz show as a class competing against the teacher or form teams of students to compete against each other.  Prizes can include a longer recess, extra gym time, or some frozen treats at the end of hot June day.

end of year booklet part 1

end of year booklet part 2

end of year award

Teacher Report Card

letter to next year students

Teacher Report Card
Carmen.Oliveira Assessment, Celebrating Success, Communication Tools, Diverse Learning Needs, Learning About Your Students, Planning, Report Cards, Year End Activities

My Report Card

As I mentioned in my last post, I feel that not only is it important for our students to receive feedback on their progress but I too like to get a sense of how my year went in terms of what I feel are the essential foundations to a successful classroom: lesson delivery, classroom culture, assessment and evaluation, and communication.  My students get extremely excited to write my report card and after all the jokes about what my mom and dad will do if I end up receiving less than favourable results, they always share very meaningful feedback about what I did well and what I can improve on.  I read my report cards carefully, reflect on the ideas and suggestions, and just before the end of the year I sit with the class and go over my results as well as my plan to address the areas I need to improve on.

I honestly feel this is a powerful exercise in modelling what I expect from my students.  I like to walk the walk and this is a great way to demonstrate to them that I am a lifelong learner and continuously use feedback to reflect on my practice in order to make the necessary adjustments so I can reach the goal of becoming not only a great teacher but hopefully one of the inspirations in their lives.

For next year I need to work on providing descriptive feedback that is more specific and provides a clearer focus with respect to how the students can improve.  I also have to be more mindful of bullying behaviour that may be occurring outside my classroom but can impact students’ learning inside the class.  I plan to work on how we co-construct success criteria in order to simplify it while at the same time making it effective.  Just a few things to keep in mind…

I’m quite satisfied with my progress and look forward to continuing on my path to living the art of teaching and learning!

Below I share with you a few report card comments.  I’d like to note that I did receive a few Level 3 marks but they were difficult to read and spoke to the same topics mentioned below.


Mrs. Oliveira was able to create entertaining lessons that had
an effective impact on my learning. She was able to effectively
communicate to me in many different ways. Mrs. Oliveira has
also provided many opportunities for me to show information
(eg. poster, Prezi, essay, etc.)

 

Mrs. Oliveira is encouraged to continue doing whatever she's doing that teaches kids effectively. She may want to observe kids more carefully as kids tend to still get bullied. She is also encouraged to try and write more descriptive feedback on students' work.

 

Mrs. Oliveira, you are very supportive, you accepted everyone for who they are. You try to push us to our limits. I loved the Smartboard lessons (even though the "smart" board ain't that smart), they were very engaging. I had a lot of fun during your interactive lessons and activities. Wonderful job!

 

Whenever we do a writing unit (opinion piece, explanatory, etc.) we always have success criteria. I find it takes a lot of time filling in the comment boxes. We should try to use the time for publishing or conferences with you.

 

 

I think for next year we could do success criteria only sometimes. I find that it takes up time filling it in.

 

The email was a fantastic way to communicate. When we have trouble we just email you the question.

 

I like how you give everyone a chance to show their learning the way that they want to.

 

The learning environment was comfortable and everyone's ideas were valued by classmates.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Heart Picture
Samantha.Perrin Assessment, Celebrating Success, Report Cards, Year End Activities

Reflections of the School Year – Student Written Reports

As the end of the school year approaches, with teachers busy with final assessments and report card writing, and students anxious to enjoy the nice weather and their last month with their class mates, it is a great time for self-reflection, self-assessment and community building in the classroom.

Similar to the awesome self-reflection activities that Carmen has done with her students, an activity that my students have really enjoyed was writing a report card for a friend and presenting it to the class, as sort of an ‘exit speech’ that reflects the events, learning and memories during the school year:

1.  Have the students select their own partner, groups of 2 or 3, and give them a list of curriculum and subject areas to brainstorm ideas about the partner that is being interviewed.   (*Click here to see an example)

2.  Give the students some free time to interview each other and  record the ideas and memories for the ‘report card’. (I connected this with the  interviews that the students did at the beginning of the school year to learn about each other).

3.  Later, send the students to individually write a short  ‘report card’ about their friend, using the brainstormed ideas.

4.  The partners are also in charge of creating an ‘award’ for their classmate.  (In my class, they were given free rein to create a ‘statuette’ or a symbol using whichever materials they could find along with a an  explanation for why the student was getting that ‘award’) . The results were creative and the sentiments were funny, personal and touching.

5.  Hold a ‘graduation ceremony’ in the classroom, where the students present their partner with the report card (read aloud) and their ‘award’.  If the students are not in grade 5 or 8 (and changing schools), the ‘graduation ceremony’  could just mean that the students are ‘graduating’ to the next grade in school, or graduating from your class. Either way, it is a fun spin on an end of year celebration, and its individualized for each student.

The students really seem to enjoy this activity- it allows them to reflect on their relationships and highlights of the school year and they have fun sharing about what was unique to them or their own experiences.  The students laugh as they recall events that happened during the year, and also being reminded of their certain tendencies. The classroom vibe is light, fun, creative, reflective and honest.

Carmen’s idea of a report card for the teacher, by the students is a great follow up to this activity, and something I will try in the future.

For me, when listening to the ‘report card’ presentations, I am able to learn about the things that stood out to the students about their school year- their successes, strengths, social growth and even pet-peeves. Not only is it a reflective piece for the children, it serves as a reflective piece for me as well -learning what the students loved, didn’t love, and what learning they would remember and carry on after the final school bell  at the end of June. This opportunity of self-reflection is a fun activity for the students and  provides me with another opportunity to hone my own art of teaching and  learning as well!