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… Read More
Day of Pink
The second Wednesday of April marks the Day of Pink where people in Canada (and around the world) celebrate diversity and take a stand against bullying, homophobia and discrimination of all kinds. “S-School” hosted a number of events today including trivia challenges, collaborative positive message murals, guest speakers, video creation projects and even served pink floats at lunch! In addition to the school-wide activities my students created their own mural featuring stats, positive messages, and personal stories/confessions as well as created their own video! Our collaborative mural full of bullying stats, positive messages and personal stories. … Read More
Resources to Start Off Your Week 59
Last week I missed my Resources to Start Off Your Week post as I was home sick with the stomach flu, but I am happy to say I am feeling much better and back at it! I’ve used both of these resources in my classroom either during this current student teaching placement or in my previous placements and can say that they are definitely keepers. As always, I will be adding these to my lists of resources under the Fav Websites heading. 1 ) Jamendo– Jamendo has one of the world’s largest collections of royalty-free music clips. Songs can… Read More
2 Stars & A Wish: Meaningful Learning Opportunities
My third week of student teaching has come and go and even though we are back from Spring Break that didn’t mean it was business as usual. This week was “Grade Wars” which is an extracurricular competition between Grades 9, 10, 11, and 12. Even though the actual events took place over the lunch hour, there was a lot of events that required preparation that ended up occurring during class time. As such, this week seemed very short as I often had anywhere from 5 to 15 students missing from my classes as they were helping get things ready for… Read More
Vintage Parody Posters
Today, in Grade 10 Geography, we began creating “Vintage Parody Posters” about the use of Fossil Fuels. (We are currently working on a unit about Natural Resources and already discussed minerals prior to Spring Break.) Globally, the discovery of oil peaked around the 1950s-1960s and has been in decline ever since. Despite this statistic, the consumption of oil and other fossil fuels has been rising every year. To illustrate our learning about Fossil Fuels and this issue we decided to create “Vintage Parody Posters” which are created to look like they belong in the 1950s-1960s (when discovery… Read More
April Currently
So here we are, it is already April. If you have been keeping tabs on my countdown that means only 1 month left of student teaching, 2 months until graduation ceremonies and less than 3 months until our wedding! (And hopefully get a teaching job somewhere in there as well). All countdowns aside though, April has been a bad month for me so far (all three days of it) as I’ve been battling a stomach flu which finally decided to get bad enough that I was unable to go to school today 🙁 If you… Read More
Digital Identity: The Big Bad Web & Why It Needs You
*This blog post is the second portion of a two-part collaborative post between myself and Mary Bertram. Head over to her blog, Prairie Inspiration, to see the first portion of this post on digital identity, online presence and reasons to join the online education community. _________________________________________________________ When you Google yourself are you happy with what you find?* Does the search bring up pages that reflect you as a professional or are the pages not even about you? Perhaps your search for “Jane Doe” brings up “Jane Doe” from Tennessee who has unprofessional taste in life choices… how do… Read More
"Honest Trailers" Classroom Edition
Screen Junkies. (2008). “YouTube Channel Heading”. Screenshot. Available online at: http://www.youtube.com/user/screenjunkies Have you ever heard of “Honest Trailers”? I hadn’t heard of them until today but I am very excited about the role that they could play in the classroom. “Honest Trailers” are put out on YouTube by ScreenJunkies and provide humorous, straight-forward analysis of recent movies by revamping their movie trailers. Here is how they describe their channel: Where guys go to get honest and authoritative advice on what movies and TV shows they should watch and which ones aren’t worth the time. … Read More
Resources To Start Off Your Week 58
Happy Spring Break everyone, as of Friday the 22nd we have officially been on holidays and won’t be back in the classroom until April 1st. The weather is almost feeling like spring time (it is around -10 C) but we still have well over two feet of snow that can begin melting anytime (seriously… anytime now). We don’t have a lot of plans for the holidays as we are calving on our farm so I’ve ended up having lots of time to prep for school and spend time with our new puppy, Kevin! I’ve been spending some extra… Read More
2 Stars & A Wish: Appropriate Pacing
My second week of student teaching has come to a close and we are now officially on Spring Break until April 1st; so we are off for a full week. I am hoping to utilize this time to further prep for my classes and possible interviews that can come up in the next few months. Two things I think went really well this week were:1 ) Enforcing Accountability with my Students– This week we had a few preliminary assignments that we worked on in my various classes. They were not extensive or time consuming, but I needed them… Read More