Wednesday, July 25, 2018

Teaching Time in an Imaginative and Playful Way

This year I took some time to reflect as a teacher about what made my grade 4/5 students sparkle, curious, creative, and joyful as learners. I noticed that my students really enjoyed learning, and took a lot of ownership when it was playful, imaginative, when they had a voice, choice, an active role in their learning, when they were engaged and motivated about a topic. I noticed that my students strengths were being imaginative, as well as they learnt to collaborate and build on others ideas. So with some inspiration from my students to teach my next unit by incorporating imagination and play and a little help from a couple student sidekicks, I turned my classroom into a Airport for the day and then began a 2 week Mathematical Inquiry about time and travel. Please see post for pictures from my classroom, information about how this event unfolded, and the resources to help you if you are inspired to try something like this in your class.  In this post I also tried to weave in my new knowledge from my Masters course on Cultural Perspectives on Learning and Development. Enjoy! 

http://smilesandsel.blogspot.com/p/this-year-i-took-some-time-to-reflect.html



Wednesday, January 3, 2018

SEL Resource and Booklist added

Hi Everyone, I've taken some time during winter break to finally update my blog.


During a course for my Masters Degree in Human Development, Learning and Culture I completed a course in Social and Emotional Development in Education. I created for my final project a SEL booklist resource to demonstrate my learning. As I am a major fan of picture books and can't resist the urge to browse titles and figure out ways to incorporate books into my classroom and lessons my final project was a SEL booklist on some of the key topics for my course- Mindfulness, Resilience, Empathy, and Bullying. I've found and used some of these great titles. My project gives you a quick glimpse of the storyline an provide some lesson ideas for the classroom. You can find it all this and links on the page SEL Resources and Booklist or click here