Author Archives: admin

Geologic Time Machine

I wrote this lesson plan for my EDCP 349 project and I just had so much fun with it that I wanted to include it on my personal blog!  It’s just too good to hide under the password protected world of Connect 😉  I’m planning on teaching it on my 10-week practicum, so I’ll update it later with notes on how it goes with actual kids, not just BEd test subjects!


Science in the Yard – Geologic Time Machine

Grade: 6/7         Time: 5 – 60 min.        Subject: Science

Curriculum
BC Curriculum 2016 Grade 7 Science
• Big Idea: Earth and its climate have changed over geological time
• Content: Fossil records and geological dating.

Purpose
• To explore the concept and scale of geologic time.
• To think about changes that have happened to the Earth since it’s beginning up to the present day.

Learning Intentions
• Students will be able to describe the idea that major events and changes on Earth have happened over huge periods of time (ie. millions and billions of years). Continue reading

On Having a Good Day

I wasn’t really sure what I was going to write down for my reflection when I sat down at my computer because well… I had a really good day at my practicum school this Thursday!  Not perfect by any means – I was 5 days in to a bad cold that was barely showing signs of getting better, with a course work load that was weighing down my mind so much that I was really worried about my stress levels when I walked through the school doors in the morning and wondered how it might affect my day.  However, even when you’re expecting things to not go your way (I was fretting over my morning coffee about how I was going to pull off a basketball lesson with a hoarse, croaky voice and a confused, stuffed-up head), sometimes things just fall into place.  The basketball lesson went really well (I personally felt it was the strongest lesson I’ve done to date, frog voice and all), I had some great moments with students that I felt I hadn’t “gotten through” to until that day, and I got some chances to work with a couple kids that I just always “click” with who always make me feel like a star teacher because my style of teaching jives well with their style of learning.  There was still constructive feedback to be had from my SA, and still moments to be learned from, but my overall perception on the day was one where I walked away from the school that day feeling proud of myself and just generally awesome. Continue reading

On Making Mistakes

On Thursday, after spending a day with my Grade 6/7 practicum class, I had an interesting moment of reflection – when you’re learning, it’s far easier to focus on your mistakes than to notice your successes.

I had a lesson planned for PE that was going to focus on defence and offence skills.  I did the warm-up activity for the lesson, which went well, and was going to split the kids into teams to play a skills building game when the class started all talking at once saying “We have teams already! We’ve been playing basketball games all week!”  This surprised me since in their previous volleyball unit they did not get to playing full games until many more weeks into the unit, so I asked them what they had learned so far in their basketball games.  They were able to explain several rules and things they had learned to me.  I had learned on my 2 week practicum that sometimes you have to be flexible when the students have a strong interest in something, as you’ll lose them if you try to make them do an activity that they’re not in to.  So with these empowered thoughts I said, “Sure!  Let’s play some basketball!” Continue reading