Hi everyone,
My name is Erin Duchesne and I am a third year, grade 1 teacher from Edmonton, Alberta. I graduated from the University of Alberta in 2018 and this is my first semester in the MET program. This year I was tasked with the challenge of teaching fully online to the 30 grade one’s from my school who chose distance learning. There was a huge learning curve, but it helped me develop a lot of new skills and techniques for teaching remotely.
My main interest in education is reading and reading intervention. As a member of a research team at the U of A, I was able to learn a lot about screening for reading difficulties and providing proper intervention. I am now able to use what I learned in my own classroom and help struggling readers in mine and other classes reach grade level by targeting intervention to their specific needs.
I am looking forward to learning more about mobile learning and technologies in this course and find some things that I can bring into my online classroom for the next two quarters of the school year, as well as things that I can use with my little learners when we are back in person.
Hi Erin,
As a parent who struggled to keep her grade 1 daughter and her younger siblings engaging in the last spring, I applaud for your hard work of remote teaching your young learners!
Looking forward to working with you in this course.
Hi Esther, nice to meet you,
Luckily in the spring the grade 1s had mostly already learned to read, but this year I had to actually teach them all how to read over a computer! I hope this year is going well for your kiddos!
Hello Erin, I am impressed with your online teaching experience! I am in informal education at the elementary level and would love your tips with the first graders 🙂 You probably didn’t have time to blog about the learning curve you mentioned, but I hope to hear about it during the course of this semester.
Some of my top tips for online grade 1 would be to keep a very consistent schedule, play lots of games, use hand gestures and signs so you can see everyone’s understanding/ answers and do small groups when you can!
Hi Erin. I am impressed that you had success with grade 1’s online. My daughter is in grade 7 and watching her and her classmates interact over Teams last spring was hilarious (though frustrating for their first-year teacher, I’m sure), and my grade 10 to 12 classes were not very participatory and super frustrating. Maybe you have strategies to share that we secondary teachers with low success in this area could learn from! Looking forward to working with you.
I am very surprised with how well it is going! I am lucky that they are little and all want to participate (but with that comes constant random stories and show and tell). To keep my kids engaged and have everyone show their understanding I have them use a lot of hand gestures, but the older kids seem to like to keep their cameras off so that is probably not the most helpful tip!
Hi Erin,
I spent a few summers in Edmonton studying music at the U of A campus, FAB specifically, from 2010 to 2012. We spent a lot of time at Avenue Pizza, Sugarbowl, Remedy, and Cafe Leva. I loved that neighbourhood. Looking forward to working with you!
Mark
So cool that you got to come to the U of A to study music! I read your intro and downloaded the Fender apps that you recommended as I am trying to teach myself to play guitar 🙂
Great to hear! It’s an excellent app. Keep me posted as to how you like it.
Hi Erin!
I can’t believe you did distance education with little grade 1’s! That must have been so challenging. Were they distracted or were they able to keep their attention on you? Nice to meet you!
We keep a pretty consistent schedule so they know what we need for each class and have some breaks throughout the day so they have time to go and play. To keep them engaged I have them use a lot of hand gestures to show understanding and answer questions like thumbs up/ down, using ASL letters or showing numbers with their fingers.