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.