14th January 2021
A few book recommendations for our classrooms!

Fiction Entry: Five Children and It By Edith Nesbit
Recommended Grade 4
Published in 1902 as The Psammead as a collection of weekly stories in a magazine, almost fifty years before C.S. Lewis wrote his Narnia Chronicles and thirty-five years before Tolkien’s The Hobbit, Five Children and It is a great addition to any list of children’s fantasy classics. The novel encompasses the age-old saying “be careful what you wish for” as its protagonists, five children, leave their home in London for the English countryside of Kent where they encounter the mysterious and sometimes malevolent Psammead, a sand-fairy who agrees to grant them three wishes. The novel uses witty child-friendly language that compliments a growing childhood mind and vocabulary without being condescending of it and is responsible for my many wilder childhood antics. Like many books of its time, the book does feature themes and characters no longer considered politically-correct, but when read with a lens of understanding and education, these themes can become valuable teaching points within the classroom of the dangers of profiling, a lesson the five children must also learn.
Possible Curricular Connections:
As a class, take a moment to ask who here can tell us what ‘fantasy’ is about? What does it include—dragons, quests, fairies, magic? Can anyone tell us about a fantasy book they’ve read before? How about The Narnia Chronicles or Harry Potter? By engaging the students in the meaning and thematic elements of children’s fantasy, we’re gearing their brains up to think about what they’re going to encounter as we read. Will they see themselves in any of the children? Do they think the sand-fairy is a good fairy? How do they think the story will end? It is both a educational and creative way to explore their reading. 

Non-Fiction Entry: Gay and Lesbian History for Kids, The Century-Long Struggle for LGBT Rights by Jerone Pohlen
Recommended Grade: Any grade from grade 3 and above
       Framed in a modern, colourful text, Pohlen’s compendium of the struggle for LGBT rights begins with the ancient Greeks, explores the birth of the LGBT+ movement between 1900-1930, and propels its way all the way to modern day. Like a traditional text, the history is told through photographical evidence, first hand experiences, interviews, news articles, and more. Included within are all kinds of identities such as sexual, gender, two-spirited, and more. It covers everything from Stonewall to the AIDS epidemic and conservative backlash as well as features/honours various LGBT+ heroes that many children might not even know they have to look up to (regardless of identity). Its timeline is expansive as well as inclusive, and it is highlighted with countless original photographs depicting the successes and struggles of the LGBT+ movement throughout our history here and abroad. This book is a valuable resource for any teacher looking to expand their personal knowledge as well as to help teach the future generations.
Possible Curricular Connections:
       The text features 21 interactive activities able to be preformed class-wide or in one-on-one type projects. The activities are both educational in the traditional sense (build a telescope, read a banned book) and in the more creative sense (make up a song parody, learn “The Madison” line dance). Each of these activities has a place in LGBT+ history. Learning “The Madison” line dance stems from the fact that same-sex couples used to be arrested for dancing in public together, so instead the community adopted forms of dancing such as line dancing (often referred to as “no touching” or “social dancing”) to get around these laws and persecution. Named for a famous dance step “The Madison”, this form of dancing which started in Columbus, Ohio, became popular internationally, and not just within the LGBT+ community. A lesson activity like this one would not only engage students minds and bodies, but would help enforce the history behind the idea that people used to simply be persecuted for doing something as fun and as harmless as dancing. 

26th February 2021

This week I discovered the 7 Grandfather Teachings and found that I really enjoyed the clear way these virtues were communicated. Understanding that people should go with truth, love, respect, and all the rest of the 7 teachings is a very simple concept, but if we were to apply it to how we view assessment, we’re left with this feeling of intense empathy and understanding that only comes with reflective thinking.
After spending this week filling out checklists and observational reflections across my BEd classes, I’ve already been introduced to many more ways of completing a formative assessment. So much of it is reflective–we place these perfect ideals on ourselves and hope to see them come out for our students, and in turn we expect the best of our students because we know exactly what it is they’re capable of. Children are naturally full of empathy, and if we can cultivate that through our assessment–keeping in mind things such as “respect develops when one takes the time to establish a deeper relationship with the other”, we’ll in turn find that though we are in positions of power over our students, there is an amicable way to find and resonate with an equality-based classroom. We want our students to be honest with us when they’re struggling, and so by adapting our assessment to their individual circumstances, we ourselves can embody things such as Zaagi’idiwin (Love), Dabaadendiziwin (Humility), and Gwayakwaadiziwin (Honesty).

10th March 2021
After viewing the short film Immersion, where a young Mexican-American boy named Moises struggles with the pressures of having to learn in a school where he does not speak the language or have access to the proper tools to help him succeed I found myself feeling entirely heartbroken. Initially it seemed as though the teacher was no interested in aiding the student as it was a course of action that would require more work, but then as I watched I began to see how the odds were already stacked against her–she wanted to help Moises but things like proficiency rates and lack of resources and aid were keeping her from helping her student with her full potential. It made sense why Moises was a strong math learner, numbers are the same in almost any language, but seeing him unable to use the Spanish to English dictionary at the end for his test really upset me. The odds were stacked against him too, and in the end he didn’t even have the teacher there because she was spread thin helping the other students in the class as well. 
I obviously don’t think Moises struggled with a learning disability such as dyslexia–I believe the words ‘floating off the page’ in the first scene was meant to signify his struggles in English, but I feel as though a lot of techniques used to aid someone with dyslexia might be used on an ESL student, such as using different means of evaluation and working on spoken language before worrying about grammar and such. Like with dyslexia, ESL students just need an extra helping hand. We have no idea how smart they are in their own language, and Moises was obviously very smart and honest. He went back to his test to try, even if the film ended on a rather sad and ambiguous note. I hope that today students like Moises would be given the proper aid with scribes for standardized tests, reduced work-load, and the use of technology which Moises clearly didn’t have, but has become much more accessible in every-day life today. 
If we take into account the inclusion of ‘choices’ for students who are struggling, I believe we’ll see a significant up-turn in learning and the willingness to learn and participate in these students. If they cannot complete a learning assessment one way, I completely believe they could have the right to choose another method that works best for them. Initially one might think ‘well then how are they learning this form of assessment’, but really when we’re pushing for things like evaluation, that’s where the grey-area of ‘just finding the right answer no matter the means’ comes in. We see this a lot in math, but if we want to make things as ‘right-brained as possible’, with manipulatives, stories, and oral language is also just as valuable as an education in my opinion. 

11th March 2021

In our EDTL 3200 class this week we were given the task to sit down and use only twenty minutes to construct a proficiency scale rubric. It was an interesting task to say the least, but as this week marks my first real descent into creating my own rubrics, I found it a really invaluable tool. Below I’ve included a photo of the rubric I was able to create in twenty minutes to go along with an environmental unit plan I had created earlier in the term. I quite liked learning about the different types of rubrics for assessment, but I did find that I struggled more with this type of rubric rather than say, an analytic rubric–which would take more time, but would help me properly break down just what it was a student needs work on. I see the upside of this proficiency rubric though, in grading a students’ overall participation and learning extensions. I think next time I build a rubric I will choose a different method but also look to combining those columns to create this proficiency ranking at the end–I think that that will really help me get a better gauge of just who is ‘proficient’.