This school year, thanks to borrowing a bit from my guidance allocation, I have some slots open for collaborative teaching. The winter months weren't great for these "partnering" units, because of the demands of course selection, conferences, and other responsibilities. However, the scheduled cooperative teaching times seem like they will be quite fruitful. Here's a quick overview.
Grade 5-6 Language Arts - Biographies with Brenda Kim
All teachers have subject areas where they excel. For Brenda, it's mathematics. For me, I love language arts, media and social studies. I'm grateful that Brenda lets me into her class to support her with this latest unit on biographies. Ironically, I'm using an early years technique in this junior division classroom. We launched the unit by exploring my old Story Bag. The students pulled out objects and then had to infer how they all connected to a single person.
Based on the objects on the chair, can you determine the identity of the famous Canadian? It was Sir Fredrick Banting, who helped discover insulin as a way to treat diabetes. The groups brainstormed ideas and shared them, before we then read an excerpt from the Yellow Cedar nominated book Fred and Marjorie.
After this group "Minds On" task, we then gathered into guided reading groups to read a bit about the person our school is named after, Agnes Macphail. This is where Generative AI was useful, because it made for me paragraphs at different reading levels. I still had to edit the final results, because Gemini decided to invent a term that doesn't exist (bronze ceiling vs glass ceiling), and the "easy" reading level wasn't easy enough for our multilingual learners.
I'm relatively pleased with how this "unit launch" went, because I feel as if Brenda can carry on without me in the class. The students can continue to read in their guided reading groups, annotate their reading, and then generate a list of objects that they could use to represent Agnes Macphail. The students can do a few more guided reading passages like this before beginning to write their own biographies.
Kindergarten Social Studies - Indigenous Culture with Ms. Chiu
Ms. Chiu launched this unit in advance by sharing the book Métis Like Me with her students. I jumped in with a lesson where we co-created a physical definition of culture with the students. (Big thanks to Ethan and Nashmia for their contributions!)
Culture is "the sharing of a way of life of a group of people". (This definition was one I found that was the simplest, from
this source, but is similar to this one from
Time for Kids, or
Britannica Kids.)
- For "sharing", our hands go back and forth, like giving and receiving
- For "way of life", our arms circle up like a rainbow
- For "group", our hands join together
- For "people", we wiggle our fingers
For little kids, it's always good to start with what they know and concrete ideas. We talked a bit about how we can be part of more than one culture. We talked about their teacher and ECE's cultures. Eventually, we will get them to look at their own culture and compare it to Métis culture.
As you can imagine, we couldn't talk about this for too long. Little bodies get restless! However, I was able to take a small group to play with a game that I originally did with a Grade 5 class. It actually does a nice job of visualizing aspects of Haida / West Coast Indigenous culture in a digestible way.
In this game, (Native Northwest Stacking Blocks Balancing Game) the object is to balance the salmon fry and eggs on the back of the adult salmon without falling over. The art is by Paul Windsor. Paul Windsor hails from British Columbia and is Heiltsuk/Haisla.
This game demonstrates what's important in Heilsuk / Haisla culture - nature, salmon, the relationship between the generations, and balance. Ms. Chiu, Mrs. Isidro, and I will continue to figure out the best way to use three adults in this learning environment.
Mentoring with my Mentee
In February, I was asked to be a mentor to one of our new teachers. We attended a Family of Schools Mentoring Evening. (During that event, even I learned about a new learning activity technique that I tried out with my Grade 6 social studies students, called "Quiz Quiz Trade". It was quite useful!)
(I didn't get permission to post his photo on my blog, so I blurred his face.)
Professional learning shouldn't be a "one and done". I realized that I needed to do more to support the professional growth of our beginning teachers. Thankfully, my mentee was willing to allow me to "insert myself". First, I observed some of his lessons. This coming week, I'll model some lessons, based on what he indicated he'd like to see demonstrated. The week afterwards, we will co-teach.
Grade 1 Math - Coding and Robotics with Mrs. Hajiani
I haven't started to plan this lesson yet with Sheri, but I feel as if I've got a good foundation already because my Term 2 focus for STEM this year has been coding. Thanks to guidance from the primary teachers with EQAO students in their portfolios, I've been
working on coding so that they can tackle that portion of the EQAO test with confidence and familiarity. I'm struck by how spiral many curricula are - parts about repeating loops in coding for Grade 3 are simpler versions of the
expectations in Grade 7.
I am keeping my fingers crossed that these learning opportunities go well. Happy Easter to those who celebrate. I'll use this time to prepare for these upcoming lessons (as well as the Spring 2026 session of York University's TL AQs - thanks Francis Ngo and Anna Jupp for arranging for time to improve the course content).
