One Teacher's Adventures

Teaching systems of government has never been my favourite subject to cover in the Social Studies curriculum. It tends to be a dry topic with very little student engagement. To try and make it more engaging and interesting for our students, a colleague and I came up with a game to introduce the idea of different systems of government. Materials You'll Need: 10 pieces of paper 10 glue sticks 10 pairs of scissors government cards, downloadable here Overview: Students are arranged into 5 different groups. Each group represents a different country with a different system of government. The teacher will distribute a red government card to each group. Each card represents a different system of government. They are: anarchy, dictatorship, direct democracy, republic, and constitutional monarchy. Each group follows the rules on their card to make the longest paper chain possible with just one piece of paper. After each group has begun, there will be a coup in ...

This summer, I'm back in school as a student.  I'm participating in a Personalized Learning Summer Institute at the University of Victoria as some summer Professional Development.  Our first assignment was to create an Augmented Selfie. We had a lot of freedom over how we wanted to put it together, we just had to make sure that it introduced who we are, what we are interested in, and our strengths. Some ideas were to create a collage, a video, or a photo essay. I decided to create a word cloud for mine. I used words to describe my character, interests, and important people in my life. The whole time I was creating this, I thought about how I was going to use it as one of my first activities this fall with my new Grade 6 students! What do you think? I can't wait to have a display in my classroom with all my new students' augmented selfies!

Classroom management is probably the most difficult part of teaching middle schoolers. Having 28-35 pre-teens in one room, all at different academic levels with hormones coursing through their veins leads to a lot of behavioural challenges.  I’ve tried many different incentive programs to help my kids to focus and follow expectations, including awarding points, good behaviour tickets, and offering prizes for good behaviour. What I found was that each new management technique worked for a short time, but them fizzled out. After reflecting on my classroom management rewards strategies, these are some realizations I came to: I’ve never liked the idea of pointing out undesirable behaviours (by putting student names on the board, for example). To me, it equates to a public shaming, and I’ve never seen it actually help anyone to change course in their behaviour. It seems, more than anything, to reinforce a belief in students that they are “bad” and have no chance to do better. Th...