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.
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