The Food Factor

 Last week was a busy one. I visited our intermediate students while they were away on their overnight trip to an outdoor education center, hosted our final Winter 2025 guest speaker for my York TL AQs, and began my Media Specialist AQ with AML as a course participant. I don't know if it's because I had a week to prepare, but I felt as if my lessons with my ESL students were more cohesive and impactful than they have been. It also may have something to do with including food into the mix.

I use a book I purchased called "Everyday Literacy: Listening and Speaking" with my early-stage ESL students. Each week, it provides a picture prompt with some simple vocabulary to use. This week's image was about playing instruments in a parade. Usually, I don't do a lot around holidays. Some religions object to marking these occasions, and it prompts me to consider which holidays are and are not mentioned in public schools. However, in this case, my regular programming dovetailed nicely with St. Patrick's Day, which was Monday, March 17. We talked about parades a bit and used the St. Patrick's Day Parade as an example.

After my success with cooking French toast and pancakes with the students, I decided to look at another avenue using food. We bought some Lucky Charms cereal and "read" the box to understand what all those shapes and marshmallows were meant to be. We wrote using our sentence starters ("I see ...") and then branched out to work on verbs ("We can ______ cereal"). I noticed that the students were more willing to write when food was involved.

For the ESL students communicating at a higher stage, we continued to investigate popcorn. The novice learners are working on verbs and nouns, but the more advanced speakers are focusing on adjectives and descriptive words with more advanced vocabulary. They tend to be reluctant writers who second guess and question every word. They enjoyed eating popcorn and so we continued our investigations. We wrote procedures on how to make microwave popcorn. To add an extra layer of challenge, students were able to earn a piece of popcorn for every word they wrote. This was highly motivating, and I had students write much more than they usually do, because they wanted the food.

We also compared different flavours of popcorn, to add to our word banks. We sampled Chicago mix and white cheddar popcorn.

I've started my Media AQ and I need to seriously consider how to incorporate more media literacy education in my lessons for my multilingual learners. I really miss having a separate strand of media literacy as a reportable subject. With the new curriculum, media literacy is one of the "umbrella expectations" in Strand A, where it is meant to be integrated into all language instruction, but that does not seem to be the case most of the time. (Dear Ontario Ministry of Education: please release the examples for the Language Curriculum! What are you waiting for?) It can be challenging to try to understand how to express ideas around purpose and messages when you are still gathering basic nouns and verbs and simple means of expression, but it can be done.  Maybe I can talk about when it's typical to eat popcorn (media environments) or how cereal is not a universal breakfast food for many cultures but was promoted by companies as a "balanced breakfast" (economic implications). I'll figure it out - eventually. 

Keep Nimble

 How was your March Break?

What did you do on your March Break?

These are the questions I might face when I return from the week away from school. 

I can't say that it was particularly exciting. The time away was helpful and useful. I got caught up on providing feedback and tracking all the submitted assignments for my various AQ courses I teach. I took my parents to get a haircut and buy new shoes. I visited a colleague who will be retiring on Monday, March 17. (Congratulations Judy! Thank you for your many years of service to the school board!) I met with some friends for drinks. 

Two things of note that I also did:

1) I went to the gym three times this week.

2) I attended a Zoom meeting for the various chapters of the UNESCO Media and Information Literacy Alliance.

Both of these events reminded me that it's important to be linguistically and physically nimble.

Physically Nimble

I don't enjoy going to the gym. I don't get the boost of adrenaline from exerting myself to the limit. I don't have the satisfied exhaustion after a particularly challenging workout. I don't see the results of my efforts like my husband does. (He's probably in the best shape he's ever been, despite his age.) I don't get a thrill from beating my PR (personal records). It's also been a very busy February and March and events have prevented me from attending my usual Monday, Wednesday, and Saturday CrossFit sessions at the gym. However, I see the need for regular exercise. This week, I had the time to return to my regularly scheduled three times a week visits to the gym. I'm sore but it was necessary.

The words of one of my favourite coaches echoes in my ears. One day, I was bemoaning the need to go to the gym, and he replied that I didn't have to go to the gym. He said that I am an adult and I can quit anytime BUT I need to find something to replace it with to keep me active. It doesn't have to be CrossFit, but it has to be some sort of exercise. I can stop working out when my body doesn't allow me to do it anymore. (It's a blessing to be able to walk, run, lift and stretch. Many people lose these abilities when they get older.) These weren't comforting words, but they made sense. This is why I still keep going. I am not intrinsically motivated enough to go on my own to a gym and shape my own workouts. I need a class, a workout buddy (my husband), and a coach to guide and encourage me to complete the task properly. 

Linguistically Nimble

I am Canada's representative on UNESCO's MIL Alliance for North America and Europe. On Friday, we had a meeting with members from two other chapters - Africa as well as Latin America and the Caribbean. It was quite humbling to see how many different countries were represented at this meeting.

Because we had a large contingent from certain regions of Africa, there was a need to converse in English and French. Bilingual countries like Belgium and Canada were asked to help out.

It was, at this moment, that I truly wished that I had kept up my French studies. My French is passable, but not great. I was very thankful that Pierre and others were able to assist to a greater extent. 

I've written about my French-speaking abilities on this blog before, when I mentioned my 25th anniversary trip to Quebec City, and driving around Montreal for a short day trip. It truly is unfortunate that it was a single university professor that ended my French learning journey. There are so many benefits to being bilingual. Many people on the call were multilingual. It will take quite a bit of effort to get my French abilities back up to where I'd like them to be, and time is at a premium for me. (I'm starting another AQ as a student this coming week!) If you don't use it, you lose it, so keep speaking all the languages you know. It also challenges me to devote more time to crafting my ESL lessons so that it encourages the use of English but not at the expense of the students primary languages. 

Cooking & Community Walks - Outside the SLLC

Being inside my library has been challenging this past week. On Monday, I was displaced because there was a request to use the library for some professional learning by a board group. Using the library for non-library reasons by groups other than students is a significant and thorny issue, so much so that some people who have taken the York University Teacher Librarianship AQ I teach have used this topic for their independent inquiry learning project theme. School libraries, especially ones in high schools, will sometimes have their physical spaces claimed for other purposes and groups. One consequence of this choice is that the students are unable to use the library for their own purposes. For me and my students, this means no book exchange that day, no recess visits, and classes are relocated and disrupted. Honestly, I don't like it. I'm glad that people enjoy the library environment for gathering, but I don't appreciate the temporary eviction. I want to be welcoming and accommodating, but when these meetings happen regularly, it prioritizes adult comfort over student learning. 

On Monday, I decided to turn lemons into lemonade by devoting time to cooking with my ESL students. I checked beforehand and none of the children were fasting for Ramadan or had any allergies. (We will take a pause on preparing any more food after this, so that tasty tempting smells don't fill the hallway and impact students that are not in the ESL classes.)

One group made pancakes and another group made French toast. The French toast was an effort to avoid wasting the eggs that we used for the Grade 1-2 STEAM egg drop challenge. We talked about the cultural significance of Pancake Tuesday and the economization of food resources with French toast. (It's a way of using stale bread.)

The things I learned while cooking with the kids included:

• youngsters do not know how to crack eggs unless they are taught (some just smashed them on the table to open them)
• cooking is messy
• pouring anything from icing sugar to syrup usually results in large amounts on plates
• students love to eat

We also practiced offering pancakes to other teachers. Asking questions in English can be hard!

On Thursday, I voluntarily left the library to go on a community walk with Mrs. Ngo and her Grade 1-2 students. This is part of our social studies collaboration. The students used iPads to take photos of important parts of the community, that we will annotate and document once we return from our mid-winter / spring holiday. A huge puddle in the middle of the walkway led to some improvised problem solving. We stopped off in the public library to get warm, since the day was chillier than we anticipated.

As for the seismic shifts occurring in the library - things are progressing steadily. The soft seating and new tables have been ordered and the layout has almost been finalized (for now). Now, I need to clean my office, where I have shoved things that I don't yet know where to place in the new set-up. 

White Things

 Who would have guessed that this is the unifying element for the things I'm reflecting on from last week? Different "white things" played an important role in my teaching, learning, and thinking.

White Boards

Miniature whiteboards have become a very important part of my teaching toolkit. Students seem to be more willing to attempt to write or draw when there's an easy way to revise. In fact, I have a couple of students who will balk at writing on paper but will consent to using whiteboards instead. 

For the final portion of my Grade 3 Social Studies unit with Room 113, we sketched Ontario on our whiteboards, to get a sense of the shape of our province, created a fabric map of Ontario, and then used sticky notes to label Ontario cities, major bodies of water, and landform regions. I even did it too!

What I found interesting was how challenging some of the students found this activity to be, even when they had these whiteboards and a huge map of Ontario with all the cities, lakes, bays, and rivers labelled for them to use as references. In the past, I would have even considered it to be "cheating" by offering a map for them to use. Now, even with these supports, I had a significant number of students mention Lake Michigan, which is the only Great Lake that doesn't border Ontario. I can't pinpoint what's changed or why, but it is a bit concerning.

Popcorn and Hot Cross Bun Icing

The students I see for ESL support have been filling their bellies just as much as their minds. We've eaten popcorn and hot cross buns, and attempted to describe them using all of our senses. I'm trying to get them to expand their vocabulary beyond saying "good". Their phonemic decoding skills have improved a lot, but I cannot take any credit for that; their classroom teachers have excelled at teaching this important component of reading. 

The popcorn has been universally loved, but the hot cross buns received a mixed reaction.

Now my goal is to try to get them to write as enthusiastically about this experience as they did consuming the food!

Snow

For STEM class, I wanted to step out of the STEM lab. We took advantage of all the snow outside to do a short investigation - does snow float or sink? Thank you to the website "Lessons for Little Ones" for the inspiration! (Spoiler: it floats!)

I hope we will get a chance to explore the question How and where can we build a snowman that will last the longest?

I also had a lot of extra yard duty this week, as I needed to help cover the absence of a lunchroom supervisor. I was delighted to see how creative the students were with using the snow outside. Some stuck it to the school walls to make designs.

Some students built snow people, balls and tunnels.

A large group of intrepid engineers decided to build a canal for the excess water on the concrete pathway.

Blank Walls

I mentioned last week that I was a bit stressed by a refresh of the library space. (I realize that this is a bit ironic, since I declared that my word for 2025 was going to be refresh.) It's happening quickly and I really struggled with ensuring that all the important aspects of library layouts were considered, from sight lines to AODA compliance to traffic flow to print collection / work zones. Big, BIG thanks go to my husband and son. I called them on Friday afternoon for a bit of reassurance, and then they consented to coming to my school to help move shelves and books so that we could see what worked. HUGE thanks also goes to Matthew Malisani. I feel guilty for involving him. He's one of our school's kindergarten teachers but he's also skilled with building things and large-scale projects. Matthew, Peter, and James rearranged and reconfigured the space. To my shock and surprise, one of the changes we've made means that I now have a blank wall that, if we still keep with this plan, will become a dedicated green screen space for filming. I have never had a lot of blank walls in my school library learning commons in this school before. There's not a ton of wall space to begin with, due to the bank of windows that provide a view of the school's front courtyard. We are trying not to block these windows as much as I did in the past, but that doesn't leave a lot of space for the shelves. I won't share the final plans until they are closer to being confirmed, but I think that we are working with the current structure and incorporating things that I might have considered to be design flaws (e.g. unmovable pillars and blind spots) into something wonderful. The photo below is of a previous organization that I will no long use, but the circle I inserted shows where the blank wall will be. I'm feeling a bit better about the alterations. I'm not totally confident in how it will turn out, but I'm hopeful.

Fake Food, Cracked Eggs, Displaced Desks & Jealousy

I will often look at the contents of my phone's photo reel for ideas on what to write about. Since I haven't written about a lot of my recent teaching, I wanted to focus on that aspect, but the subject matter differs widely. "If you can't beat 'em, join 'em", so I'm devoting a short paragraph to each of the subtopics. (I think the unifying element in all of these are that I'm very MESSY!)

Fake Food - The Pros and Problems of Paper Maché and Procedure Reading

I know why I chose to combine paper maché with our study on foods. I wanted students to have experience reading instructions and widen their food vocabulary, without the immediate risk of hot ovens. Many of the verbs used in preparing paper maché are what we in education call CVC (consonant-vowel-consonant) words, which are three-letter words that are relatively easy to sound out. The instructions also included sight words (words you should recognize immediately without sounding them out) and familiar nouns we reviewed. 

There were some things I neglected to consider with this endeavor. I don't see all my ESL groups for the same amount of time. My hours are based on their STEP (Steps Towards English Proficiency) level. Those at an earlier level see me more frequently. That meant that some groups were at the painting phase while others hadn't even started. We also really needed to have the balloons coated completely in a single period so they could dry properly - many half-completed projects became useless because the balloon shrank and/or the strips of paper collapsed with no support. Speaking of balloons, I needed to add in time for the students to get to play with the balloons. (This wasn't necessarily a bad thing, as some of my students really need the physical outlet and social bonding. However, it did slow things down.) My attempts to label the work also bombed, and many students couldn't recognize which project was theirs, which led to people painting objects that weren't theirs. All this pasting and painting made for a very messy library and STEM lab. 

Despite all the problems, we are finally seeing some final results. Some objects don't quite look like what they are supposed to be, but some, with a bit of additions like stems and leaves, resemble their fruit.

Cracked Eggs - STEM Egg Drops, Food Insecurity and Failing Forward

I teach STEM (Science Technology Engineering Math) to two Grade 1-2 classes. I grabbed this idea from a book I bought called "Smart Start STEM". We looked at how the brain works to protect the skull, recited the Humpty Dumpty nursery rhyme, and then spend several weeks designing a contraption that would protect an egg from cracking.

I debated for a long time about whether to use boiled or raw eggs. There are significant equity and class issues related to using food for lessons, especially if the food won't be eaten. Lately, there have been a lot of noise in the news about egg shortages and how expensive eggs have become. I didn't want to waste eggs but I also wanted the impact (literally and figuratively) of how effective the student-built protectors would be. In the end, I decided to put each egg in a tiny sealed plastic bag. The young engineers could see if their prototype worked, without wasting eggs (and making it even messier in the STEM lab). I plan on using the cracked eggs to make French toast with our MLL (multilingual learners) this coming week.

I had to keep my mouth shut a few times because, despite our lessons on using other means to attach items together AND on combining hard and soft materials, some of the inventions were obviously not going to work. I had to let them experience it first-hand. (I also had to stifle a laugh when a particularly astute student said to me as an aside "Well, of course that group's egg broke. They provided no cushion and dropped it into their box.")

The students were very excited - almost too excited - to include other adults in the dropping stage. We invited teachers on their prep and went to the office to drop eggs. I loved seeing their faces of delight when it didn't crack.

I wish I had more time, as some of the students had suggested, to have an escalating competition to see how high we could drop and if there was a design that was superior to all others. As it was, I had completely messed up the STEM lab between the eggs and paper maché to the extent that the Grade 7s weren't able to go and work in there as planned. (Sorry Lisa!) I cleaned it up on Friday (with a bit of help from students and colleagues) and ended our egg odyssey.

Displaced Desks - Getting Physical with Partnering Units and Refreshing the Space

I still have some collaborative teaching periods, although they have been severely interrupted with my various conferences and "failure-to-fill" coverages. (The latter is when we don't have enough supply teachers to take care of classes, so specialist teachers step in for supervision and teaching.) 

Hopefully I'll write in the near future about the work in the kindergarten classes. For this blog, I want to look at the culminating task for the Grade 4 social studies students in Room 113 and the launching task for the Grade 2 science unit in Room 114.

The Grade 4s were completing their investigations on the natural regions of Canada. I've mentioned before that I find this particular topic a bit dry. Why do we need to care about the differences between the Cordillera and Canadian Shield? In the past, I did a huge unit on a fictional tyrant interested in buying Canada. The current group was too small and the topic a little too close-to-the-surface lately (51st state? Oh dear!). When I first surveyed the students, they said they liked to be active. So, we used our hands to create clay topographical maps of Canada, then used this mental preparation to make a huge map of Canada based on natural regions using fabric and furniture. (Maybe we were inspired by the huge map we used a month ago.

The Grade 2s are working on forces, so I challenged them to move one of the heaviest objects in the library - a huge desk that was a castoff from the office after its renovation. Using a mix of push and pull, they moved it! (Don't worry - I watched them closely so no one would strain themselves or attempt anything dangerous.)

It was timely that we moved the desk, because we removed it completely from the library shortly after taking these photos. My administrator is keen to do some major renovations. I'm excited but I'm also nervous. I'm not a visual-spatial thinker, so I cannot "see" what the changes will be like until they actually happen. On this blog, I've documented the various changes the space has undergone. (This was from September 2013. This was from earlier in March 2013. This was from the 2017 refresh. This was from 2022. I should also look at my various school library maps I've made for/with the students; that will show how the space has changed.) However, there's buzz about some significant alterations (e.g. entry doorway, shelf removal, art installations and delineation of teaching and reading spaces). It's stressing me out a bit! I often need help for making these decisions. (It's why I'm glad my interactive white board is now a Promethean that is completely self-contained; I've had wires inserted into places and projectors mounted on ceilings in spaces where I've changed my mind and decided it wasn't ideal. Pity the tradespeople that had to install things that in the end I didn't use!) I'm also used to "doing with less". When classrooms wanted longer tables instead of individual desks, that furniture was taken from the library makerspace and switched out with discarded teacher desks that no one wanted. I'm not used to devoting school budget to furniture expenditures. (Usually I use book fair money to buy a wobbly chair or bean bag chair.) I'll just need to trust the process.

Jealousy

This is an odd topic to end with, but it's one I'm wrestling with lately. I need to determine how to lessen the jealousy that sometimes happens between my classes and students. I actually had a student last week have a temper tantrum because he wanted to spend the whole day with me instead of attending his regular class. It just wasn't feasible. The cloning machine isn't working! I have students hunting me down like the movie "The Fugitive" because I've booked Forest of Reading chats with them at lunch that I wasn't able to complete because time ran out. I happened to cook popcorn with my Junior STEP 1-2 ESL class on Friday, because we had completed several outstanding tasks and it fit well with our food and senses vocabulary study (discussing things we could see, hear, smell, taste, and feel). This nearly caused a riot, as the other students demanded to know when they were going to have ESL class and when their group would get to make and eat popcorn. If you have any suggestions for me, please share them. I'll let you know if I come up with any grand solutions.