One Teacher's Adventures

  French is one of my favourite subjects to teach, especially at the Middle School level. In BC, students begin taking French in Grade 5. When I get them in Grade 6, they have an initial understanding of vocabulary, and it's amazing to see how much growth can occur in just one year. Last year, my class was so excited in February to be reading (and understanding) this French text during our study of Francophone communities in Canada. This text comes from the TpT store Les Ressources de Mme Bedard Here are 10 tried and true activities and games that can bring some variety and fun to your FSL classroom! 1. Question du Jour (Question of the Day) What? (purpose of the activity) This activity gives a low-stress way for every student to speak French everyday, practice asking and answering questions, and connect letter patterns with pronunciation. How? (steps) Create a question.  I like to ask questions that fit in with the theme of the unit we’re studying at the time. I usually ...

  I have spent a lot of time over the past few years thinking about assessment. What does it mean? What does it look like in Middle School? How can teachers do it well? What's the "best" way to assess student growth and learning? Assessment has become a passion of mine, and I am ever-evolving on my quest to do it well. Here, I'll share some ideas and observations I've noticed over the past few years in my own classroom and those around me.  What is assessment? Assessment is the process of gathering information and data in order to gain an understanding of the strengths and struggles of our students and their learning. It is meant to help measure the progress of learning and to inform where to go next. Assessment can take many forms. Teachers (and students and parents) tend to think of testing as assessment. While testing is one way to gather assessment data, it is not the only form of assessment that should be used in a middle school classroom.  I believe that the...

This year, I was fortunate enough to collaborate with my amazing Teacher-Librarian to teach my Grade 6 students about Spheros . What are spheros? Spheros are spherical robots that are great for beginners because they are very durable! The library doors were open one day and one of my students made an error in her program and the sphero raced out the door, down the stairs, and ended up behind a vending machine!  How did we use spheros? I'm not an expert in robotics, but luckily for me (and my students), our Teacher-Librarian is. She began working with my class once a week on programming in a variety of lessons, which culminated in our students working in partners to program the spheros to reach specific coordinates on a coordinate plane.  This group decided to make a right angle triangle with their sphero. You can see where they marked the page with their attempted coordinates, and they were very close to their goal! Once the students were pretty sure their program was accurate...