Teacher Extraordinaire - Portfolio of a Teacher and Lifelong Learner

Last year I found out about an excellent program called Postcrossing . With Postcrossing, you sign up for an account and then can initially send up to 5 postcards. The addresses that you are given are random, and you must also write a code on the back of each postcard. Once the postcards arrive, they are registered by the person who receives them. After that your address goes into the random pool and you can receive a postcard from anyone doing the program, anywhere in the world. Students really enjoyed doing this last year, and it enabled us to learn a lot about the world around us, by finding connections with different places around the world. It made us all more global minded! Below is our Postcrossing board mid-year.

Often implementing change in schools can be difficult, but sometimes we need to be the leaders, find other like-minded people and help in making that change happen. We need to realize that change does not and should not happen overnight, and look towards long term sustainability. This is fueled by sharing the load, changes occurring laterally (from the top to the bottom to the top), creating new leaders within work situations, having time to collaborate, valuing all opinions and then following through with actually collaborating. Teachers having time to collaborate, having an atmosphere/work situation of respect and not overloading teachers is all essential in keeping up the energy and drive necessary to affect change. Changes should be based on innovation, research, patterns and changing trends. In other words deep knowledge in an ever changing world needs to be valued. It is only through these aspects and methods that we can hope to close the achievement gap. Of course teachi...

Every year when classes are writing description, they have an opportunity to bring a toy into school, take a picture of it and print it in ICT class. As my students are second graders, they are learning I.C.T skills with this project. Another use for taking pictures of their toy, might be taking pictures of two or more toys in different positions, printing off three different pictures and then writing their own "toy story" based on the sequence of pictures.

"Friendship is" was the first of two lessons discussing the meaning of friendship. It is a lesson that was designed for the the unit Don't Need Friends, as it fits into the book's overall theme. During the lesson, children had the opportunity to think about what friendship meant to them, after a friendship themed read aloud. It was apparent during the think-pair-share that students were not thinking exactly along the same vein as me, and that it was okay. Despite the fact that some of their answers did not appear to answer the question I had posed, they had obviously understood the themes and were interpreting the book in their own way. This lesson shows Commitment to Students and Student Learning since it students were eager to learn. It also reinforced the meaning of certain peer relationships, and connected student experiences to their day to day life.

From a young age, children must learn how to ask questions, in order to be inquisitive learners. As a part of the unit for Don't Need Friends by Carolyn Crimi, I taught a posing questions class to my grade one students. By using the strategy of "teacher in role" (and being enthusiastic while acting in the role), students responded curiously, wanting to ask many different questions. For students who struggled with arriving at a question on their own, they could use the questions on the brainstorm to guide them. Students asked several questions that were not originally on the brainstormed questions list, curious about the character 'Dog'. Several children wanted to tell 'Dog' what happens in the story, and had to be reminded that they were interacting with Dog before he became friends with Rat. Students respond to the power of enthusiasm, and ideally want to have fun and learn. As a result, this artifact adheres to the objective of Commitment to Students a...

At my second practicum, I taught several lessons on fractions and decimals, including the connection between them. At the same time, I was reviewing world geography with the students, for the Social Studies Ancient Civilizations unit. As a result, I created a Math/Literacy Lesson based on the book If the World Were a Village by David Smith. The book asks the readers to suppose that the entire world is contained in a village of 100 people. The resulting lesson had students explore language, math, geography and social justice. Several of the read aloud questions were taken from a lesson plan on the website  The Society for Safe & Caring Schools & Communities . The lesson itself contains several steps/materials. It is designed to be implemented over long morning or afternoon block. When I completed this lesson, I found that the consolidation needed to be completed the following day. In order for students to be mindful and productive participators in the conversation, I gave ...