Educators demonstrate a broad knowledge base and an understanding of areas they teach.
How I met standard 6 in 490 practicum:
I brought my passion into my lessons, in particular a focus on inclusivity, global travel, passions, and hobbies. I allowed my students to learn about me as I purposefully shared information about my life to help inspire them.
During our Nov 30th Health lesson, we had a discussion of proteins in our Healthy Eating unit, I shared experiences from my travels such as eating a camel burger in Morocco, and eating crickets in Japan. This helped bring a more global perspective to my lessons.
This is only one example of how my life experiences were used as strengths to help students understand and appreciate other worldviews.
An example of this is when I highlighted my experience as an immigrant who was born in Ireland in our lesson about different upbringings in our Nov 25th lesson about what makes us special.
Cross curricular lessons were a very strong focus during this practicum. I worked hard to seamlessly connect all learning so it flowed and felt more natural for my students. At every opportunity I would reference and discuss other learning. If I used a book for a math example, I would ask students to consider if it was fiction or nonfiction. Some examples of my most cross curricular lessons are:
Nov 16 – Art/Health – Healthy eating art
Nov 18 – Health/Math – Compared pie graphs to the Canadian Food guide plate
Nov 23 – Art/Science/Health – Art lesson on germs with science motions to create the art
Nov 23 – Math/Health – used healthy food groups for pictograph
Nov 24 – ADST/Science – catapult creation to combine ADST building with Science lessons on forces
Nov 30 – Art/Social Studies – community drawings
Dec 1 – Social Studies/Art – Rings of community activity
The British Columbia curriculum was quoted and referenced in all of my lesson plans. A strong focus on the core competencies and how the lessons benefited my students.
How I met standard 6 in 491 practicum:
In 491, I partook in a lot of self-learning to be knowledgeable about the units I would be teaching. I taught myself about the moon, so I could teach to my student inquiry-based questions. I also taught myself about the ROVERS mars and found/tested videos and resources so I could share with my class. I constantly tried new things in the classroom, but practiced all demos at home so they would be ready to go for students.
I brought in my own learning and experiences in my social studies lesson on exploring (Morocco) and cross connected all lessons.
I invited students to elaborate upon the material based on their own experiences (One student taught us a math trick, another student taught us about her faith (Islam). I let students know they could teach the class about something if they wanted, this gave them the autonomy to become teachers! The students really like this, and by the end of practicum, almost every student had taught the classroom something.
I continued to seek out professional development opportunities and resources to continue learning (for my students benefit).
