To Have and To Hold

 This post isn't about matrimony. It's about tangible objects that students make or use in lessons.

I haven't written much about my actual teaching practices over the past three months. It's been happening, but it hasn't reached my blog. I hope to combine several projects into a single reflection.

STEM Pigloos

From November to January, our primary division students worked on a STEM project to build a skinny pig habitat for inside the cage. It took a long time, but the students finally completed the projects. Maybe, I should more accurately say that I ended the project. It was time to move onto other things. The students would have liked tinkering with their contraptions indefinitely, but they weren't modifying their blueprints. 

We were able to place some of the habitats in the cage for the skinny pigs to use. Alvin and Simon liked some of them and ignored others. They liked large, roomy hideaways and it took them a while to get comfortable with some of the fabric doorways that a few students added for extra privacy.

Globes

We have started a new unit in Grade 6 Social Studies, "Canada's Interactions with the Global Community". I was hungry for some multimodal learning and I happened to have Styrofoam balls left over from last year's puppet unit with the ESL class. In small groups, the students drew significant lines of latitude and longitude on the balls, and then created their own globes with the continents.

The students really enjoyed creating these, although I'm really going to have to seriously consider how to evaluate these artifacts. 1) They are the result of group work. I am cautious about granting marks to someone who just had the benefit of choosing good partners. 2) What am I evaluating? This isn't a visual arts project and I don't want to be unduly swayed by an aesthetically pleasing rendition. 

Forest of Reading Artifacts

I already mentioned how we made bannock after prompting from a supply teacher. Since then, we've read several more of the Blue Spruce nominees and tried to make the activities hands-on. 

The students really wanted to make Jamaican patties after reading Nadia L. Hohn's Patty Dreams. We came up with a compromise - we tasted patties and made pretend ones out of yellow Play-Doh. 

For the book The Friendship Blanket, I distributed blankets to use during the read aloud and students determined the best way to share them (and still see the book). 

I suspect that my Silver Birch and Yellow Cedar readers miss having a passport to use to track their progress in reading the nominees. I really need to carve out time to examine how this shift in the way I run the Forest of Reading has impacted the experience for the students. I should have actually limited even further than I did the number of participants in the club, because students were still having problems accessing the books. There were "bottlenecks" where students weren't passing along their books in a decent amount of time. There's always been a secret "black market" for trading the books that circumvent my involvement, but it nearly torpedoed some students' qualifying for a Forest of Reading Festival ticket. 

Upcoming Partnerships

I should have put two and two together sooner. Having physical objects really helps with story retention and engagement. I will soon begin a collaborative teaching unit with Brenda Kim and her Grade 5-6 students about biographies, and I will dust off my "Story Bag" to have significant objects inside to launch the unit after March Break and demonstrate how to create an engaging biography.

Loose Parts and Sewn Animals

I wish that I had more opportunities to develop some more learning invitations with my loose parts. I've finally accumulated a decent stock of materials, storage vessels, work space surfaces and signage, but I haven't put it all together yet. I admired some of the learning invitations developed by one of the participants in a TL AQ course I'm currently facilitating (one of four) and it really makes me want to return to this. I attempted to do some loose part work based on a book of Indigenous poetry produced by the TDSB UIEC with my ESL students. I liked their initial attempts, but I've had to put this on the back burner because I am revamping the way I provide ESL support. There have been some issues and the students are not progressing as quickly as I'd like, so we've made some changes to the schedule. 

At least I'll be able to complete one task, inspired by Ms. Wadia's Grade 8 art project (where students create stuffed animals for their JK/SK buddies based on their illustrations). The majority of my ESL students are of Chinese heritage, so they were eager to talk about Lunar New Year when it began. We looked at the animals of the zodiac and each student selected an animal to make into a simple stuffed toy. Some of the students are almost done and we will be able to put them up on display once the writing portion is complete.

Booklets and Posters

My mother has recently transferred from the hospital to a long term care facility. My father keeps forgetting, so I made a little booklet for him based on the common questions he continually asks, with simple answers and photos to help him understand. Feedback so far has been that it's been useful. One of my March Break projects is to create a few posters to go in my mother's room at the LTC home, so that she will see faces from her family and that visitors will learn a bit about Mom and the important people in her life. These posters took a lot longer to design than I anticipated. Hopefully they will be a positive addition to the space. 

Hopefully this provides a quick overview about what's been going on with teaching and learning in the library space at school. Time to return to more regular CrossFit workouts, catching up on reading and writing, and beginning the school yearbook!