Miss M's Learning Space

This post is based on a presentation that I completed with a group of other teacher candidates. We were tasked with teaching a concept from another subject area through dance. We chose to explore the dance Tinikling which is the national dance of the Philippines as a means to explore the development of the country as part of the grade 8 geography curriculum (as detailed below). This dance originated during the Spanish colonial times in the Philippines. The local population of people were enslaved and subjected to punishment consisting of getting hit with thorny bamboo sticks on their feet. The Filipino people became very good a dodging the bamboo and the Tiniking dance was born. Choreographic Form of Dance & Dance Elements We chose to model the choreographic form of Call and Response . In this type of dance one soloist or group performs, followed by a second soloist or group whose performance responds to the first. This can also be referred to as a lead-and-follow activity, o...

This social studies class at Brock has opened my eyes to some fascinating teaching strategies that make learning meaningful for students. For example, I was always scared of inquiry - now I feel much more prepared to attempt it in my own classroom. I've also learned the value of enthusiasm. Not everything I'm excited for will thrill my students, but you can bet that if I'm bored, they're bored too. I feel much more prepared now, especially after all the incredible presentations, to make my classroom engaging and even exciting for students. We learned about the value of role playing to assume a perspective, and strategies to help students understand their place and impact (at a local, national, and even global scale). The strategies we learned are not easy to implement. They require a skilled teacher who has incredible control of her/his class in order to make smooth transitions and learning accessible for all students. However, despite how challenging these strategi...

For our inquiry unit plan, we chose to cover grade 6, strand A: Communities in Canada, Past and Present by asking the question:  What does it mean to be Canadian?  To say the least; it's a daunting question.  Summary Our inquiry cycle will be delivered in a loop; we will start with a similar assessment task to the one we finish with. Our assessment tasks require students to answer complex questions about Canadian identity. By the end of the unit, students will be expected to synthesise everything they’ve learned in the unit to answer similar questions to the ones from the beginning of the unit. Each lesson will be addressing a topic that is asked in the final assessment.  Each lesson addresses one of the following aspects of Canadian identity:  immigration,  physical geography,  canadian identity through art,  multiculturalism,  legalities of immigration,  perspectives of immigration,  inclusivity in educati...

https://goo.gl/QDX8bO  It’s important to include primary sources in lessons for several reasons. Foremost (in my opinion) is that primary documents have no ‘filter’ or ‘bias’ - the information is straight from the source and didn’t have to pass through a third party before getting to you (like textbooks). And, they are clear about the perspective they represent. For example, a textbook represents only the perspective of the people who wrote it (so they included what they felt was the relevant parts of history) whereas if you examine different people from the time period through primary documents you’re going to get their perspective and know that’s what you got, and likely get a very different story. In addition, by including primary documents, students learn what it takes to gather information from scratch. The information, or timeline for example, isn’t perfectly organized already for them - they have to become the historical ‘detective’ and figure out the information they n...

We were asked in class to create a lesson plan exploring the cross-curricular opportunities in social studies. So, my group decided to create a lesson about residential schools taught through drama and role playing . The general concept of this lesson is to take on a role and then reenact in accordance with your role in response to a certain situation. In each group of four students there are two Martians and two Earthlings. The Martians are representative of euro-Canadians and the Earthlings represent FNMI people (the profiles and situations are at the end of the lesson plan document).

As a class, we were asked to find a truly innovative lesson plan to critique. While we all found wonderful lesson plans, they weren't necessarily that innovative. Innovation describes something that hasn't been done before. The lesson plan I found was about exploring what it means to be Canadian through metaphor was interesting, but not necessarily innovative. The idea is from Inquiry PACs and uses the following poem as a launch point. Does anyone know any really innovative lessons they can share?

The most obvious benefit to teaching financial literacy directly is that dealing with money is something students are going to do for the rest of their lives, and is typically one of the most stressful parts of one’s life. Learning about budgeting is such an essential skill. But, beyond the benefits to the student themselves, it’s also beneficial to society as a whole. People who are knowledgeable with money will typically carry less debt, and the economic crash of 2008 was largely the result of people buying houses they couldn’t really afford and driving house prices artificially upwards. Ideally, if students learn how to create an accurate, livable budget, then they won’t overspend and get deep into debt . The following EDUGains videos about financial literacy in Ontario elementary schools and acting out distribution of wealth through drama outline different aspects of financial literacy as well as ideas for incorporating it into your classroom. Some ideas I thought were really...

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...

During my placement, my associate and I attempted an inquiry project that completely failed. The intention was for students to do research on a person they found inspiring, and then share the biography with the class. Then, each student would try to find connections between their inspiring person and other people’s. For example, one person did research on Malala Yousafzi who was heavily influenced by Gandhi, and someone else in the class was researching Gandhi so they would (in theory) discuss why they think Gandhi had an impact or how Gandhi had an impact. However, it was exceptionally challenging to facilitate. Each student was working at a different pace, and several would make statements like ‘no one has ever inspired me’. In addition, several would look up a few facts and then be done for the day and play on their devices (which was hard to police considering the general chaos in the room). As a result, I never felt like I could facilitate all the unique learning challenges, whet...

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...

Professional Teaching Goal It's all about the connections. http://fondationdiagonale.org/connectedness/ Since social studies, history, and geography (which I have shortened to ss/h/g for the purposes of efficiency) are so closely tied to what's happening in the world around us, I think I need to spend more time reading the news and staying connected with current events. In class, we had a large group discussion where we talked about past events related to current events was a real eye-opener for me. And when I say current I mean literally that day. Everything that happens can be related to something that happened in the past or something that happened somewhere else. However, prior to that discussion I didn’t know that much about current events. Granted, I’ve heard of almost everything, but I don't really ‘know’ much about it, let alone know enough to make the kinds of connections I'd need to in order to facilitate current, relevant learning for my students. Mov...