Student Teaching Update

     Yesterday marked the official “half-way point” of my LAST student teaching placement ever. I have been progressing through my units with my four classes and am really happy with how everything has been going so far. Despite a multitude of missed days, (snow days, guest speakers, “Grade Wars”, field trips and sporting events!), I feel like we have been able to accomplish quite a bit in the last 3 1/2 weeks and wanted to showcase some of the awesome work my students have been creating.

Grade 10 Geography

     We have been discussing Natural Resources and have so far made our way through minerals and fossil fuels and are now just beginning water resources. Last week I shared the Vintage Parody Poster assignment we were beginning as part of our discussion on fossil fuels and I’m happy to say we are now all finished! Here are some of the results:

I’m very happy to point out that ALL of the images that we used, fit in with Creative Commons usage rights and were all appropriately referenced either on the poster itself or in an attached bibliography! 🙂
If you’d like to see the inspiration for this assignment and see our poster criteria, see my post from last week. We also took a break yesterday to celebrate the Day of Pink and created a mural and Harlem Shake video!

Grade 9/10 ICT

     Due to the number of extracurricular events going on in the school, my students just finished up their previous unit with “Mr. L” last week. This week we have been progressing through a general review of PowerPoint and will begin working on digital storytelling on Monday. I hope to share some of their work within a week or so.

Grade 11/12 Agriculture

     We have been working on a unit on Soils and have, so far, been discussing the components of soil, forces of formation, the soil profile and soil textures. As we progress we have been relating each of these topics back to it’s effect on agriculture and what it can mean for farmers. One of the projects we completed was creating “Facebook profiles” to learn about the soil profile. (Our class is quite small so each student was able to focus on a specific soil horizon from the profile.) We came up with the following criteria for our profiles by looking at what was included in their own personal Facebook profiles: 
1 ) Name of the Horizon
2 ) Profile Picture
3 ) Birthday (using dating information based off of the last glaciation period)
4 ) 8 Friends
     – Could be the other soil horizons, specific minerals, or living organisms
       depending on which horizon they were completing
5 ) 5 Status Updates
     – Includes information related to your specific soil horizon
6 ) 3 Extras
     – This could be any other sections that you might find on a Facebook profile
       (picture albums, favourite movies, songs, activities, quotes, etc).
     – All information had to be related to the specific soil horizon
Here was one featuring information on the B-Horizon (also known as top soil):

We are now working on creating museum displays about our case study on The Dust Bowl. I will share more information when the project is completed.

Grade 8 Social Studies

     With my Grade 8 class I am experimenting with creating outcome based portfolio assessment projects. They are currently keeping all of their work samples to be added into a portfolio assessment that they will compile and reflect on for assessment purposes. As such, I do not have a specific project that I can show right now but I can share what we are working on.

     At the beginning of the unit I put up the following bulletin board in our classroom with a center map, images on the sides, and timeline along the bottom. Since then I have added QR Codes to most of the images and they are currently working on projects that require them to scan the QR Code, answer questions, shade in portions of the map, and add artifacts to the timeline. It has really become an interactive, collaborative piece of work! I will post more pictures once they are completed and all of the information has been added 🙂