Miss M's Learning Space

The creative process, as defined by the Ontario Curriculum , is a flexible approach to learning and exploring the arts. It applies to any creative endeavour such as music, visual arts, dance, media arts, drama, or language arts. There are 8 steps/stages that are continually being revised through feedback. The diagram below outlines the stages, and the dotted arrow indicates the cyclical nature of the arts (i.e. never ending, one project informs the next). The Ontario Curriculum Grades 1-8: The Arts p. 20 (2009).  In practice, this is a wonderful technique to encourage the incorporation of feedback and familiarize students to the idea that feedback is a good thing and shouldn't be seen as punishment. Instead, by having ongoing consultation with the teacher and peers and incorporating self-assessment, the student will produce more thoughtful work that represents more depth and understanding. For example, in dance if students are working at a higher level of Bloom's Taxono...

As part of our social studies class, we created a lesson that integrated social studies, drama, and language arts and attempted to teach children about different perspectives involved in historical events. We chose the residential schools and framed the lesson as if Martians had moved to earth, and each student was given a character to play (whether it was a Martian or an Earthling) as well as a situation they had to resolve and present dramatically. I will explain further in a later post, but the results of the lesson on my peers at Brock was fantastic. Walker, Amanda (2016).  Before I get into detail about what happened during the run-through, tough, I need to discuss some of the challenges of creating this lesson. For starters, it took us a while to come up with an idea that really hit home the concept we were trying to get at. We started by facilitating a privilege walk where every student moved forward/backward based on their profile, but we decided it wasn't pointed en...

If you had asked me yesterday whether I thought an inter-disciplinary system was a good idea I would’ve agreed with you, but now I see why it’s such a good idea. The comment “ comprehension is comprehension whether it’s in science or literacy ” really resonated with me, and made me think back to how I struggled finding meaningful content for my grade 7s when I was teaching language arts during my placement. I had the Nelson Literacy set which is a wonderful resource, but all the articles were examined in isolation. There was no connection between the articles and the student’s own life. I think if I’d approached it through the lens of integrating multiple curriculums it might have been more engaging for students. I also think the idea of having a large project that is worked on in multiple classes is a great idea since here’d be no gaps between stages of learning and students would learn more explicitly how to carry skills across various subject areas. Currently, when students take a...