What To Highlight at the Open House

 I realized as I prepared this week's blog post that it has similar themes to last week's prose about our visit from the Ontario Deputy Minister of Education and our board director. Both moments were about presenting and promoting the best things that happen in our school. However, the focus is a bit different because the audience is a bit different. If you are savvy in media literacy, you'll recognize that this idea is part of a key concept: that audiences negotiate meaning. 

Thursday, April 25, 2024 was our Open House night for the families of our students. It is an opportunity for our school community to check out all the different kinds of learning happening in our classrooms. It is NOT meant to be a "dog and pony show", i.e. something that is outside of our regular daily practice that is meant to show off. It is a more informal chance for the significant adults in students' lives to get a glimpse at some of the projects or assignments the learners have been working on so diligently.

I deliberately chose not to host a book fair in the library at this time, even though it would probably be a huge money-maker, for two big reasons. One: I run a book fair during Curriculum Night and it is a huge endeavor. Two: I want parents and guardians to see the library as a place for cross-curricular learning, not simply a spot to borrow books or buy books. 

This year, I deliver a lot of prep coverage. I teach social studies to Grades 1-4, drama to Grades 1-2, drama/dance to a single Grade 3-4 class, and a myriad of subjects, mostly arts-based, to all the kindergarten classes. I deliberated long and hard about WHAT exactly I would display that would demonstrate the learning going on. Some of my artifacts are ... <chef's kiss> and others were, in my opinion, a bit "weak sauce". Let me elaborate and defend/explain myself.

Grade 4 Social Studies

I was most pleased with this display for several reasons. It is based on the most current activities we are doing at this time, so it's fresh and new. It is visually appealing and accessible to adults who aren't familiar with the curriculum. (The front table has pictures that the students drew of ancient people, places, or things, that they had to sort into the correct civilization of origin.) The display also contained objects that the visitors and students could interact with - my chain mail armour, which I wrote about on this blog last month. Parents and students who weren't even part of the Grade 4 cohort came to touch the heavy shirt and even try it on with assistance.

Grade 3 Social Studies

For the Grade 3 display, there was a bit of artificiality involved. All the students created a "City in a Box", but as the description sign correctly states, this was from last term. I knew I would not have enough room or space to show all the Grade 3 projects, so I invited a few students to volunteer to have their work highlighted in the library. I provided extra time for these eight students to polish their project a bit more than they were able to when they first worked on this assignment in January and February. They quite enjoyed getting some extra time to "fancy up" their boxes and seriously depleted my stock of glue gun sticks in the process!

Grade 1 & 2 Social Studies

This was the trickiest group to promote and the one with which I was least satisfied. I will be doing a glorious inquiry project with the students in a couple of weeks. The problem is, we haven't started the big inquiry project yet. We've done a few mini-projects that are collaborative Google Slide Decks, but not all the children have completed their designated slide. It takes a long time to establish some of the content required in social studies. Therefore, I thought it was most realistic to offer for display their social studies folders, which contain their work samples. It's very paper-centric, which I didn't really like. It's not very photogenic. However, it gave those parents who did come by a chance to see the marks that will eventually shape their final report card grade. It's not pretty, but it's practical. The purpose was for the families to see student work, and this is the work I had available to show.

Kindergarten Dance, Drama, Music and Media

Many of the things I do with the kindergarten students are experiential. We play pretend, move to music, sing and dance. Thankfully, my primary means of pedagogical documentation for these activities involve photographs. I took the pictures I captured from February until April and combined them into a huge slide show that I projected on my interactive white board. For instance, in the photo above, I spread a blue and yellow top sheet on the carpet and we pretended we were at the beach. This group grabbed some storage container lids to pretend to be in boats on the ocean. Having actual photos of the students being active really helped me feel like I was giving an actual glimpse of the kindergarten learning that really happens in the library.

There were some absolutely PHENOMENAL other classrooms with fabulous examples of student work. A few I want to highlight here are:

• Ms. Pillai's multi-disciplinary project with her Grade 4-5s that combined visual arts, oral communication, reading, and writing. Her students read about Black Trailblazers from history and used mixed-media with watercolor paints to reveal the people they researched. Varshinie even helped them create QR codes that, when scanned, led to an audio recording of the students reading a passage about their famous Black Canadian.
• Mrs. Commisso's Grade 2-3 work samples that combine art with math with writing. On her students' desks were stories that they wrote based on pictures they made and drew using 2D wooden geometric shapes. They also had these adorable flower gardens that had math (fractions or addition facts or something really neat - I can't recall exactly what).
• Ms. Daley and Ms. Wadia had their intermediate division rooms filled with all sorts of incredible work. Their history projects took center stage but they also had other kinds of work, such as intricate art pieces (in the Grade 7 room, it was Japanese Notan art and in the Grade 8 room, it was pleated dual perspective social justice drawings). 
• Mr. Malisani's kindergarten room was filled to the brim with all sorts of incredible objects that the students had created. In fact, when I went in their classroom to take them away for a dance period, they had so many things to show me that we never left! They were very proud of their plasticine artwork that they created, inspired by Barbara Reid. They wrote about their art work and had photos of them in the process of creating the art. Their finished products were on tiny easels that their teacher had purchases specifically for this purpose. They had plants that they are growing in the window and a cityscape that takes up an entire table. They had books that they were able to read that related to all of their inquiries, and they had activity stations that Matthew, their teacher, had set up so that the grown-ups could experience some of the tasks the students do in class, from math games to more plasticine art centers.

I really hope that the parents and guardians appreciated the evening. Even though it's not supposed to be "fake", everyone spent a great deal of time tidying up their classrooms and making everything "just so" for our guests.