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!