Teacher impact

The other day, I noticed that is was one of my ex-student’s birthdays – I’m friends with his mum on Facebook after their family moved away from the area and I left the school anyway.

This particular student has Asperger’s and really gave me a run for my money at times when I taught him in Year 2 in 2015. But my fondest moments throughout the year were those in which he shared his friendships with his toys with the rest of the class. I wrote about his friendship with his Zhu Zhu pet Zak here.

The other friend he had was a large stuffed dolphin that he named Lachlan, which he brought back to school from a family holiday to Queensland. Lachlan soon became part of our class – I had to include him on the daily roll when I called out everybody’s names, I had to tell Lachlan’s owner to block his ears when we were going to watch a video (as dolphins don’t like loud noises) and Lachlan even had his own Happiness Bucket. The other class members would say Good Morning to Lachlan and stood up for him fiercely when another student punched him in the nose. Lachlan liked doing Maths, which was helpful, as his owner sure didn’t, so it was awesome to have Lachlan sit next to him during Maths.

Each Friday, we had a type of Lower Primary Assembly, where a student from each class received the ‘Ice Cream Award’  – a free ice cream from a local shop. I liked to give this award to members of my class who had really excelled throughout the week, or showed one of our school values beyond the basics. As I worked my way through my class roll, I decided that Lachlan’s owner would be excited if Lachlan the dolphin received the Ice Cream Award. (I’m not entirely sure what reason I gave, possibly for helping his owner with his Maths work!)

My goodness, the cheer that erupted from the WHOLE class when Lachlan’s name was announced was incredible. The smile on his owner’s face was so big it almost didn’t fit on his head!

What I had forgotten – or to be more honest – not even realised, was the impact that this had on me, and this student.
I wrote a message for him on her wall for his 11th birthday and I was stoked to receive a message from his mum on Friday and it melted my heart. It included a photo of her son, cuddled up with Lachlan the dolphin in bed and it read:

“Hello Fiona, sorry for taking some time to send this! Still sleeping with Lachie. He also still talks about Lachie getting the ice cream award! Hope you’re well. xo”

*Just to note, I was NEVER allowed to call the dolphin Lachie like his mum can, I had to pronounce his name in full, Lachlan, every time!

It made me sit back and think…3 years ago this stuffed dolphin toy received an award, through no merit of his own. I didn’t have to give an award to a dolphin, but he had become such an important part of our class that it was hard to overlook him as an award recipient. But the student STILL talks about it.

Sometimes, we need to form relationships with students that we find find difficult, challenging, or downright stupid (talking to a stuffed dolphin every day, seriously?!). But they’re the things they remember. They still talk about it. They value those things.

So before you dismiss those ‘silly’ things, think about the impact it might have on your student…and yourself!

 

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Working in pairs

On Tuesday, I was sitting in my office, listening to my colleague teach her lesson in the Science Lab. Part of her teaching was to keep the students moving around and interacting with multiple peers. She did a fabulous job quickly selecting pairs of students to work together for short periods of time, before changing partners to work with others.

It got me thinking of a strategy I used a few years ago, both in Year 4 and Year 2, called Clock Partners. I heard about it at a PD that I attended, and used it in a variety of ways across all subject areas.

Simply search for ‘Clock Partners’ or ‘Clock Buddies’ in Google and scroll through the images – there’s some on Teachers Pay Teachers and other paid sites, or some for free. As a last resort you could always draw your own clock!!

The idea is for students to form partners 12 times and write their PARTNER’S name at the specified o’clock number. Ideally, having an even number of students in your class helps with this, however, when I’ve had an odd number I’ve joined in as a teacher.

The script to getting this organised would go something like this:

Teacher: Write your OWN name at the top/centre of the clock.

*wait 20 seconds for students to do this*

Teacher: Find a partner and stand with them so I can see that everybody has a partner. Write your PARTNER’S name in the 12 o’clock section.

*wait 20 seconds for students to do this*

Teacher: Find another partner of the opposite gender/same birthday month/same height (try and mix up the criteria so they’re not just picking their friends). 

*wait 20 seconds for students to do this*

Teacher: Does everybody have a partner that they have NOT had before?

*if yes, write your PARTNER’S name in the 12 o’clock section.
*if no, wait for students to re-mix before anybody writes their partner’s name. This will become increasingly important towards the last few numbers of the clock, to make sure people are mixing up enough to create new partnerships each time.

I laminate the students’ sheets and they keep them in their desk, or book box for easy access. When we need to do partner work, I simply say ‘Find your 6 o’clock partner’ and there’s no arguments (or there SHOULDN’T be!). If their clock partner is away, I have a designated spot in the classroom for ‘lost partners’ to stand – they either buddy up with another lost partner, become the teacher’s partner, or form a trio.

For those classes that are renowned for losing things, I create a spreadsheet so I have a master copy of everybody’s partners for those students who lack organisation.

Maths in Motion

My planning this term has been fairly slack given that I’ve been so sick and there’s nothing worse than being sick at home and trying to plan lessons. So, many of my lessons are comprised using the 6-step lesson plan: plan your lesson in the final 6 steps that you take to walk to your classroom!

Today’s Year 4 Digital Technology lesson was meant to be tinkering on Scratch, but I simply couldn’t be bothered collecting the shared laptops for the students to use, so I worked with what we had and we made slowmotion videos instead. I incorporated Maths into the lesson too, so it covered a little bit more curriculum!

I connected my iPad to the projector so that I could give students a quick 45-second tutorial on how to use the iMotion app. I demonstrated how to create a maths-like video using an abacus which built bigger numbers the more photos I took and then I let the kids loose on the Maths resources in the classroom. Given that it was their first experience with the app, there were a few wobbly cameras, a few fingers in the way and the odd blurry photo, but you know, practice makes perfect!

Here’s some of the creations!

 

Anti-cool students in your classroom.

I really struggle to finish a book these days. But part of my #18for2018 was to read 11 books and record them on GoodReads, so now I’m accountable.

A few months ago I downloaded Rosie Waterland’s ‘The Anti-Cool Girl’ onto the Kindle app on my iPad. I started it in December and finally finished it today (I’m not proud of how long it took me!!). The following thoughts come from my own head – I wasn’t asked to review this book, I haven’t been paid…blah blah blah. 

It gets into the deep nitty-gritty of life. The trials and tribulations of a child, through to an adult. It’s crude and honest…and not usually the kind of book I’d read, despite me being a huge biography lover.

What it brought home to me most though, was the focus on the ‘anti-cool’ students in our classroom. Rosie Waterland talks about her school experience, not being accepted by friends, being pulled out of class by welfare officers and spending time and time again in foster homes. Having parents and de facto parents who drank and smoked and did drugs at all hours of a school night.

How many of our students come to school sleep deprived because their parents were arguing late into the night? Or have no food for school…or breakfast…or dinner?

How many of our students are wearing uniforms that they’ve washed themselves, or maybe haven’t been washed in weeks, or have been worn by three older siblings and are now falling apart at the seams? Or maybe they dread a casual clothes day because all of their clothes are faded hand-me-downs or from Vinnies and out of fashion.

How many of our students cannot focus because they’re worried about which house they’ll be sleeping at, or how many people they might have to share a bed with?

If I took nothing else away from reading this book, it was that compassion is important.

All those classroom rules we have about being on time to class and coming prepared? They might not need to apply for some kids…as just getting to school is an achievement for them.

Those posters and advertisements we put in the school newsletters about packing a healthy lunch for your child? Probably just important to have some of that nutritious food in the staffroom for those kids who don’t have anyone to pack theirs.

Sometimes the rules don’t apply. Who are the ‘anti-cool’ kids in your class or at your school? Show them some compassion.

You can do anything…

Scrolling through Twitter this morning reading all of the updates from my teacher PLN who were heading back to work today to start the 2018 school year.

Today was the 29th of January – the first day of school for many, but at my school, our first official day was January 19th. In the last 10 days we’ve had:

• 2 weekends
• 1 public holiday
• a return flight to Melbourne for a school conference
• a collegial team-building Escape Room experience
• a First Aid refresher course
• meetings…timetable revisions…meetings…planning time…room set up time…meetings…more timetable revisions

As mentioned in this post, I’m teaching every student from Prep-10 this year across various Year Levels. I’m also the eSmart Coordinator & Digital Technology Mentor. I get asked by teachers to help with student iPads & passwords (luckily I’m the second-in-line for this task, thanks to our official IT guy), asked by office staff to help them develop a Google Form to collect data on this, that and the other, or to help update the school website…plus I run the school Facebook page.

This year, I have to learn to say NO.

• No, I wish I could help, but I don’t have the time.
• No, I don’t know how to do that.
• No, that’s not a priority for me.

Or….can I just say ‘No’, without needing to justify it?

As I scrolled through my Twitter feed, I saw this tweet from Pip Cleaves:

I saw this, saved it to my desktop and printed it. I walked straight to the photocopier, picked it up…and pinned it to the wall at my desk.

THIS.

Thanks Pip.

Comfort Zones are for sissies.

In 2018, I will be pushed waaaaaaay out of my comfort zone. Why?

I was asked by my Principal a few months ago if I’d be interested in running a STEM class. While I’m not 100% behind the concept of running STEM as a separate class because I feel that it should be fully integrated, due to needing an additional elective for Year 7/8 and a few other staffing conditions, I said yes!

This means that I’ll be teaching a STEM elective for a composite Year 7/8 class. There are 3 different 7/8 classes meaning that I’ll teach the same content for Term 1, 2 and 3 to the groups as they rotate through and then Term 4 will be different, as students opt-in to the elective of their choice in the final Term.

For the Year 9/10 class however, student opt-in to it from the beginning, so I have them all year. This is where it gets a bit scary. Year 7/8 content I feel like I can handle for the most part…but Year 9/10? My High School Science skills are fairly limited and rusty beyond all belief and regarding High School Maths…well, I can add numbers and work out angles and percentages…that’s all I need right? I’m not so stressed about the Technology & Engineering aspects, so that’s my little comfort factor.

To fully push me out of my comfort zone beyond all belief, I’m teaching French. FRENCH.  From Year 2-Year 8. To be honest, I accepted the request to teach it (I had the option to say no…) and I am excited about it, but it’s going to be a steeeeeep learning curve. I know a few French words, like crêpe, baguette, croissant…but they are all foods, which surely can’t take up the entire curriculum? French podcasts, here I come! Plus apps, puppet shows, comic strips…eeeek!

 

Teaching something out of your comfort zone next year? Let me know!

And good on you – the world is a better place for taking on a good challenge!

Setting up your classroom!

As we approach the end of another school year, my mind immediately jumps to the beginning of next year and what I’m going to do differently, or keep the same…new posters or furniture arrangements, what apps we need on which iPads…

I’m sure I’m not alone.

However for the last 2 years I haven’t had a classroom to set up and I won’t have do do it for 2018 either. But it got me thinking about all the different classrooms that I rotate through and the types of things I would be focusing on as a teacher – if I was staying in the same room, or moving to a different one!

Displays:

• Do you have a designated wall space for different subjects? Where do you display anchor charts for various subjects? Or key terminology?
  I am a big believer in visual literacy around the classroom, including word walls, a ‘maths dictionary’ wall and I’ve recently introduced a VCOP wall into one of the classrooms I teach in. In the past, I’ve also had a ‘Wall (or Window) of Fame’ for any students who are featured in our newsletter or local newspaper – I simply cut out the article and blu-tack it to the area – a great way to showcase students and make them feel important. Birthday charts are also a way to help students feel valued, as well as a way to remember and plan for any birthday cupcakes that may be brought it!
  I also like to include very clear instructions and guidelines. These posters from First Grade Glitter and Giggles were used quite often in my class, to avoid me repeating myself.
  A few other things to consider: are you going to display a visual timetable for each day, or have a classroom helper display?

Door:

• Do you have photos or names of all students at the entrance to your class?
  I always had some sort of theme to my class, so in the past I’ve created door labels with their names and our class logo, or ones with their photo. I’ve used similar labels for their lockers or bag hooks and if using set seating, I’ve attached labels to desks.
  If your class has a name, for example the Year 2 Rainbow Fish, I always display that on the door too!

Stationary:

• Where will your students keep their stationary and books?
  My students have often had their own pencilcases with everything inside. The problem I often found is that even though parents were asked, they didn’t get everything labelled and things went missing and suddenly I had 8 kids in my class without a pair of scissors.

  Sometimes I had pencilcases just for coloured pencils, textas and crayons and I kept the greyleads, erasers, scissors and gluesticks in a communal area for all students to access. I found this worked really well, as students were required to work together to keep all the resources clean and tidy for the whole class to use. Depending on the grade level, I’ve also had tubs on tables with coloured pencils, textas and crayons too, so there were no pencilcases in my classroom at all.

  I created book covers for each of my different subjects (usually an A4 size) and on the first few days of school, we spent a few minutes here or there colouring them in, so that students could personalise them. If students wanted their books covered in patterned contact, I simply attached it to the front of their book using a piece of clear contact. Unfortunately the ones I used to make were made using Microsoft Publisher before I used a Macbook, so here are some other ideas I found.

Notes from home:

• Where will you collect permission notes, or late slips?
  I used to just have a pile of notes that I’d collect and then potentially lose them. I made myself a little mail box, so instead of giving notes to me, students would just slip them inside and I’d collect them all at the end of day when I wasn’t doing 20 other things and could deliver them to the office without getting distracted!
  I found that it was also important to designate a box in the classroom for Library Book Returns, so that if students brought their books back before our allocated day, there was somewhere to keep them safe.

 

Hope you’ve found this helpful – comment with any extra ideas that you have for helping set up a classroom!
(I could go on and on, but nobody likes to read a whole essay!)

The 3 Little Pigs…STEM Style!

This term in Integrated Studies, our unit in Prep/1 is Topsy-Turvy Tales, with a focus on creativity.

Last week we watched Walt Disney’s Three Little Pigs and then I read the story from a book. We listed the similarities and differences between the 2 presentations.

We started talking about the ‘materials’ instead of ‘building stuff’ that the pigs used and talked about mathematical terms such as strong, weak, light and heavy. I’d seen lots of STEM-based ideas on Pinterest about getting students to build houses for the 3 Little Pigs and using the hairdryer as the Big, Bad Wolf.

Yesterday, students worked in pairs to build a house to protect one little pig from the hairdryer wolf. I provided the following materials:

• a blue placemat (the house was required to sit on top of this placemat)
• a toy pig per pair
• plastic cups & plates
• Strawbees
• coloured magnetic rods
• craft sticks
• wooden skewers
• cotton buds
• pipecleaners
• straws
• coloured paper
• rubber bands
• cellophane
• PVA glue
• sticky tape

How does STEM fit into this activity?

S(cience): we talked as a group about how strong different materials are, what they are made of (plastic, wood etc) and which materials may blow away in the ‘wind’ from the wolf
T(echnology): following the building, students used Flipgrid on their iPad to reflect on their finished structure
E(ngineering): there were lots of questions such as ‘How can we make this stronger?’, ‘What else could we use instead?’, plus comments such as ‘This doesn’t bend or stand up straight like we need it to’.
M(athematics): students needed to make sure that their given pig fit inside their building through informal measurement, plus lots of chatting about how high the walls should be and how tall the pig was.

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Surprisingly(!) none of the pigs were affected by the ‘wolf’s’ blowing! Some of the houses were more 2D than 3D though, so today we talked about the features of a house that protect people – like walls and a roof! The pair who used a cardboard box to simply place over the top of their pig weren’t supposed to use a cardboard box either – they pinched it from the cupboard!!

Pretty sure the teacher had the most fun too…using the hairdryer to blow down houses was very cool!

Diving into Scratch Jnr!

Earlier this year, I excitedly mentioned to my colleague @erinlucie that there was an iPad app as a prelude to the coding application Scratch. I whipped my iPad out and opened the app, only to find that I had NO idea how to use it and couldn’t seem to make anything happen/move on it. Fast forward a few months and I have since used the Scratch Jnr app twice. By myself, for about 10 minutes each time. However, it’s loaded onto all of the iPads in Prep-6 at our school, so yesterday at lunch two of my Prep students opened it up and asked me how to use it.

Following my basic instructions, this is what was produced by a very excited 5 year old.

Let’s talk about how basic my instructions were. They went something like this:

Me: Hey, do you think we could make the cat by giving it some instructions?
Her: Ok.
Me: The green flag is the button that makes the cat do what we tell it. So we need to click on the yellow button, to find the green flag button. That tells the cat to start moving.
Her: I found it and I pressed it but it didn’t do anything.
Me: We need to drag it next to the grey cat outline. Now that we have the start button, let’s choose a direction for him to move. Click on the blue arrow and drag an arrow down to connect to the green flag button, just like a jigsaw puzzle.

Aaaaaaand, that was about it. Seriously. The most technical terms I used were ‘instructions’, ‘button’ and ‘drag’. I didn’t even mention the words ‘coding’, ‘blocks’ or ‘algorithm’, that will be the next lesson. After telling the cat when to stop moving (by finishing the instructions with a red ‘stop’ button), she pressed the green flag at the top to start the movements – she was stoked!!

After this, we inserted a background: “Click on the picture of the sky and grass”. Then we added a second character and discovered that by clicking on the paintbrush next to it, you can edit the character’s colours! The final part that we added was some talking – a simple speech bubble – I did the typing, she did the talking!

Today in the Prep/1 class, we all opened up Scratch Jnr and had a go. We followed some instructions step by step (the same ones as yesterday) and then they had some free time to explore the app. Within 2 minutes, a student had discovered how to record her own voice to add it to her instructions. Here’s what we ended up with – the last one is the one I made after talking about the miracle of Jesus calming the storm – I’m pretty proud of the 10 minutes I spent on it and the kids even got to add the sound effects!!

Please don’t be afraid to give it a go! I’m bursting with ideas as to how I can use this in my Term 4 Integrated Studies program – creating narratives and fairytales!

Slow-motion videos with 6 year olds

Last week I had the brainy idea of teaching my Prep/1 class how to make a slow motion video in our digital technology time. Why? It seemed like something that could be fun, looks at logical thinking and step-by-step processing, as well as integrating some teamwork!

To start, I modelled it. I chose 2 plastic animals from the toy tub, sat the kids in a circle around it and showed them what the iMotion app looked like on their iPad. I showed them how to press ‘New Movie’ and press the ‘finger’ button (for manual image capture, rather than on a timer) and then I asked each of them one at a time to move the little frog a tiny bit closer to the dinosaur. As each child moved the frog, I took a photo. After 15 photos, the frog was at the dinosaur! I talked about stopping – pressing the stop button TWO times, and then how to watch the video. The kids were so amazed that I could speed it up, or slow it down.

I let them go off in pairs, armed with an iPad to share and a range of toys to create scenes to capture. It had varying degrees of success, ranging from tantrums due to partner arguments to not being able to keep the camera still, stealing toys from other groups, or taking photos of our partner’s body as they moved the toys.

Yesterday, I came armed with 3 different mazes drawn on A4 paper. This time, they had to place an object at the ‘end’ of the maze and move another object from the ‘start’ to the ‘end’. Here’s what we got: (the last one is probably the most successful, but bear with me!)

Lessons learnt:

• Think about some sort of tripod – some kids can’t comprehend the concept of keeping the camera still…fair enough, they’re only little!
• When exporting the final product, make sure it’s at a speed that is easily viewable
• Talk about not rushing the photos so that nobody’s arm/face/back/nostril is in the way
• Explain how to turn the iPad up the right way, so the video isn’t upside down!

Not bad for our second attempt! Hopefully we’ll be able to use this knowledge to demonstrate how plants grow….or some sort of sustainability focus!