It has been a hectic couple of weeks in my classroom. I have been taking on more of the teaching in the classroom, which has been exciting for me because I am finally feeling like a real teacher in this classroom. As a result of my transition into becoming the classroom teacher, I have felt and experienced all of the highs and lows of being a teacher. There were some tough days these past couple weeks. There were days where I questioned whether or not I could really do this job or if teaching was even right for me. But there were also great days where I thought to myself – “Yes! Yes, Sophia, the students are learning and they understand what you are trying to teach them.” Seeing my students learning and understanding drives me to teach and boosts up my own confidence in what I am doing for my students. Am I going to have more bad days in the future? Oh yes, I can guarantee it. But I take those bad days as learning experiences for myself to better my own teaching practice. I also realize that with bad days, always comes good days and I know that I will have more good days than bad.

But moving on, I am going to recap what has been happening in my classroom for the past couple of weeks! For Fairytales, we worked with problem and solution quite a bit. The students sorted and organized problems and solutions of all the fairytales that we have read and they also created their own problem and solution on another day. Both activities were a success. The students are really understanding the key elements in fairytales.

This week, we had a 2-day project with castles! We studied castles through a cross-curricular lens, by incorporating art, language arts, and math. We began our study on castles at the computer lab where we took a look at some real castles online. The students practiced drawing some castle features on Kidpix, like battlements, towers, doors, windows, etc. Then, we came back to the classroom and the students built 3D castles using different materials such as blocks, legos, and recycled materials. This was a great hands-on activity for the students and most of them did such an amazing job. I was very proud of the Grade 1s and their creations. The next day, we made some 2D castles on black construction paper and used sponges to help decorate the castles. I found the art idea here. The Grade 1s used a ruler to measure the dimensions of their castles, which was a new experience for them! Overall, they did a fabulous job on their castle study. All the teachers have been raving about the castles that the students created!

We are continuing with our plants unit. Some of the students bean seeds are growing very well! The classroom plants have also bloomed since we first planted them. If you compare the picture from week 2 you will see that there has been a lot of growth happening! It has been exciting for both my students and for myself. Many of my students think that we are also growing an onion – little do they know that it is actually a Halloween flower! Next week, our class will be heading to a honey bee center to learn about the importance of bees to plants and to our food system. It should be quite exciting as this will be my first field trip.

Until next week.