Teacher Extraordinaire - Portfolio of a Teacher and Lifelong Learner

 Every teacher should always have at the forefront, how they can best communicate with parents, and also support connections between school and home.  How to we create lifelong learners? How do we create inquirers? How do we foster healthy relationships between the school community and parents? How do we help educate parents in best practices with child development?  During my tenure at Chengdu Meishi International School , I designed and led a two period workshop for parents called "What is Inquiry?" wherein parents were led through the inquiry cycle, and periodically would have to complete an inquiry related activity. It shed a lot of light on the key understanding that parents should have, if their child attends a school where inquiry is paramount.  The following article is one that I wrote at Zhuhai International School to explore the teaching of maty in lower primary, and to encourage parents to take more of a hands on approach / an inquiry based approach and an...

I really enjoy cooking with my students whenever possible, as it enables them to get real life practice with concepts such as volume, weight and fractions. This past year student table groups were each randomly given a different sweet treat to create a recipe for. Then they had to bring in ingredients to make enough for a small serving for everyone to enjoy. The categories were - fruit salad, parfait, drinks and baking free cookies/cake. Below are pictures of what the students made. Students were also required to bring pencil and paper to record any changes they might have to their recipe and were instructed that their recipe must contain at least one fraction, one instance of using volume and one instance of using weight. Students all enjoyed making and eating these sweet snacks.

“ Math Math Baby” is a collaborative effort done by myself and three colleagues in teacher's college, that replaces the lyrics of Vanilla Ice’s Ice Ice Baby with concepts from the grade 6 math curriculum. Given the length of the song and necessity to create rhymes, we decided to focus on several concepts. These concepts included shapes (2D and 3D), measurement, graphing, operations, numeracy (fractions, decimals and whole numbers) and problem solving strategies. Each verse reviews two or three of these concepts. It is our hope that this song and performance would serve to convince students that math can be fun, and that any subject can come alive. The song could be played as a transition for math class or as part of a lesson to help us learn and remember the different units of grade 6 math. We felt that a rap would be an appealing medium of communication, and appropriate for an older elementary school audience. Many Grade 6 students are in the process of maturing, and sometime...