End of First Practicum and Titanic Jeopardy Lesson Freebie!

Last week on Friday I had the last day of my three week practicum. Although I was relieved that I was finally able to relax afterwards, it was sad to say good bye to the students I had gotten to know over the weeks.


To put a closure to the time I was at the middle school, I ended my poetry unit with a poetry cafe event where the students each chose one or two poems to read which they had written throughout the weeks. For the poetry cafe, I got the students to bring in treats to create a cafe atmosphere, and played some calming instrumental music in the background. To go with the whole cafe theme, every time a student finished reading, we all snapped our fingers which helped create the mood. We also had a student be an MC, which he did an excellent job doing!


Here was one of the treats the students brought in for the poetry cafe on the last day of student teaching!

I am so thankful to have been able to do my practicum with such supportive staff and amazing students! They were so cooperative, sweet, and helpful. I will miss them a lot for sure! I've learned through these three weeks and also from being an assistant last year that an important part of being a teacher is to learn to let go and being able to say good bye. This can be quite hard...


Last week I taught a Jeopardy lesson on the Titanic which I'd like to share with you today. It's a one time lesson that doesn't require any background information from the students, so I think it would work well for substitute teachers teaching any grades between four to seven.

The lesson is started with a picture or a short video related to the Titanic as an attention grabber, followed by a discussion on what the students already know about the topic. The class is then divided into two teams. There are strips of paper with facts written about the Titanic posted on the walls of the classroom. Students have a short period of time (I initially said 5 minutes, which I think ended up being too long...3 to 4 minutes should be enough for grade sixes) to memorize as many facts as they can. All of the questions in the game will be directly taken from the facts posted on the walls. Once the time is up students return back to their groups and decide on a speaker. Only the speaker is allowed to state the answers to the questions. The teacher takes off all the facts from the walls. After playing the Jeopardy theme song, the game starts! 


Here are the basic rules:

• Each group will take turns selecting the categories and answering questions.
• Only the speaker can answer the questions. The team members will therefore discuss the answers to decide what the speaker will say. 
• If one team gets an answer wrong, the other team can steal half the points if they get the question right.
• Each team has 30 seconds to answer each question.
• If a team gets a daily double, they will first decide how much they will wager. Then, the team will answer the question. (eg. If a team wagers 500 points and they get the question right, they will win 1000 points. If they answer incorrectly, they will lose 500 points.)
• *An optional Final Jeopardy session can also take place for the final round, where each team decides how much they will wager for the final question. 

The grade six students absolutely LOVED this lesson and I had so much fun teaching it! The great thing is that this lesson can be adapted easily for other subject areas or topics as well, especially as a review activity at the end of pretty much any chapter.


 Here is the lesson plan, along with the facts to cut into strips of paper to post onto the walls of the classroom, the questions and answer key, and the Jeopardy category sheet. Enjoy!

Heart Maps!

The last two weeks have gone by so quickly! It's amazing how time passes by so quickly when you're busy doing something you love! After the first three days, I've pretty much been teaching every day and am gaining a lot of hands-on experiences. I'm so lucky to be able to do my practicum with such supportive staff and amazing students!

Today I'd like to share a lesson I taught as part of my poetry unit which I got a lot of good reviews on! They are called heart maps, adapted from the idea from Georgia Heard's book, Awakening the Heart which has loads of useful ideas on how to teach poetry. The heart map is a great way for students to get in touch with their emotions and realize what makes life meaningful for them. It's also a useful tool for students to go back to during the school year when they can't think of topics to write about.

I introduced the activity by telling the students that they will be making maps of their hearts. None of the students had ever worked on this activity before, and seemed very curious. I told them that their heart maps would represent different things that they care about, memories that have stayed with them, qualities that make them special or unique, or experiences which have shaped how they are today. 

I also gave them the following list of guiding questions to help them come up with ideas:

• What was the most fun you've ever had?
• What makes you unique?
• What people/objects/activities are important to you?
• What has really affected your heart?
• What secrets have you kept in your heart?
• What are some experiences or central events that you will never forget?

I was so amazed and inspired by the finished work that the students handed in! They are now all put up on the bulletin board in the hallway, and I've been asked to teach this lesson in another class as well :)

Making Connections with Text

My practicum is finally starting tomorrow! For the last couple of weeks life had been quite busy with final assignments, projects, and exams, but now the good stuff starts! I'm so excited to finally be able to be in the classrooms.


Over the next three weeks I will be in a grade six classroom teaching a language arts unit on poetry, and European Handball in PE. I'd like to share with you a great idea I borrowed from Kim at Finding JOY in 6th Grade which I will be incorporating into my poetry lessons on how to make personal connections with the text. I thought that this strategy would fit perfectly into the Prescribed Learning Outcomes of English Language Arts here in BC:

A4: Select and use strategies while interacting with others, including

• making and sharing connections

B8: Respond to selections they read or view, by

• explaining connections (text-to-self, text-to-text, and text-to-world)
• 
  

After spending the first day on an introductory lesson on poetry, students will begin making personal connections with various poems they find which they can relate to. To explain the three different kinds of connections, I will use a poster which will hopefully help them understand how to make such connections, and the differences between the three types: text-to-self, text-to-text, and text-to-world.

After I model how to make such connections through a think-aloud, the students will work on making their own connections, then sharing their thoughts with partners. I'm going to use the form below for the activity. 

Next week the kids will start creating their own poems, using heart maps (mentioned in my previous post titled Great Resource for Teaching Poetry) and other activities to spark their interests and creativity. I'm thinking of ending the unit with a poetry cafe <3

I will be teaching this lesson towards the end of this week so please let me know if you have any suggestions or advice on improving the lesson. Thanks!

Great resource for teaching poetry!

Last week I visited my mentor teacher's grade six class and met the students in his class for the first time! When I saw the kids and how smiley and awesome they were, I just got so excited and eager to start planning lessons for my practicum. The count down begins! 4 weeks until my first day :) I'm planning to visit the class one or two times a week once spring breaks is over (it's two weeks in our district) so that I can get a head start on getting to know the students.


When my mentor teacher and I discussed what subjects I should teach, we both agreed that poetry would be a good unit to work on. It also ties into a language arts assignment I have in once of my courses at the university, which requires me to create a unit consisting of three lessen with a writing, reading, and oral language focus in each lesson. In order to start planning, I've been reading through an amazing book which my professor has recommended to me. I'd like to share this highly practical resource with you, which I feel would benefit both new and experienced teachers.

The book is called Awakening the Heart: Exploring Poetry in Elementary and Middle School by poet Georgia Heard. I'm sure many of you have heard of it, since it seems to be a quite famous book in the field of education. The book is divided into chapters which explore how to effectively teach different elements of poetry, such as "Making a Poetry Environment", "Reading Poetry", "Writing Poetry", "Crafting Poetry", and "Sharpening Our Outer and Inner Visions". I found that many of the ideas mentioned are easily adaptable to many of the grade levels in both elementary and middle school settings. What I really like about this book is its focus on teaching in a way that helps students open their hearts and develop personal relationships with the world they live in through poetry.


Here are some of the ideas that stood out for me:

• The Heart Map

This is my favourite! Children start by each drawing a shape of a heart, and inside it illustrate important memories and things that they care deeply about. This activity is a great tool to help children develop ideas on different topics they can write on. An example of a heart map can be seen on the cover of the book. 

• The Living Anthology Project

Students post poems in various areas of the school to create a learning environment where poetry becomes part of their daily lives, and hence more accessible. The students try to choose poems which relate to the specific location where it will be posted. (i.e. A poem about water, or waiting, would be posted beside the water fountain. )

• Poems on Desks

As a way to introduce middle school students to poetry, the teacher tapes poems to the students desks while the students are out for lunch or recess. When the students come in, they are encouraged to silently walk around the class to read the poems on the desks and to sit down at a desk that has a poem which they like or are able to relate to.


*As an extension to this activity, I thought that it would be a good idea to have two or three copies of the same poem taped on different desks, so that once everyone has sat down the students who choose the same poem can get together and discuss their thoughts afterwards.

• Six-room Image-poem

Students are instructed to take out a blank sheet of paper, and divide it into six squares. These squares will be labelled into the following categories: Image, Light, Sound, Questions, Feelings, Repeating Word(s). Students are encouraged to close their eyes, and visualize an image or a particular memory and write down the words you come up to describe each category. The author further notes that the number of these boxes can be adjusted according to the grade level. Moreover, she also states that students can rearrange or substitute the labels with other categories such as smell, voice, touch, ...etc

Needless to say, I've almost finished reading the book and it's FULL of post-its all over! I'm so excited to use some of the ideas for my poetry unit!