Before beginning my extended 10 week practicum, a big question came to my mind about implementing creativity; is the implementation of creative and inquiry based learning going to be as easy as it sounds? The answer, as I have discovered, is no. There is so much that goes into providing students with hands on, experiential lessons. There are teachers out there who are able to provide this type of learning, and my question to them is, when is the last time you slept? I have tried to make my lessons fun and engaging for my students by using a variety of activities, modes of learning – kinaesthetic, auditory, written, exploratory, and I have to say, planning one lesson with exploration and experimentation in mind is tough. Hours of preparation go into these lessons. Now, I am not sure if this is because I am still brand new, or if it is always like this, but one thing I have discovered, with the help of my school advisors, is balance. Balance is a key factor to doing anything well. As much fun as our students have with hands on learning, doing the occasional worksheet is not a terrible thing! I have learned that in order to give my all, I needed to take a step back and realize that it is better to do fewer grand activities that are meaningful, rather than trying to do too much just for the sake of it.

I recently taught a science unit on light and sound, my first big theme of my practicum. I worked very hard at making my lessons fun, and experiential, but my main focus was – “is it meaningful?”. One particular day, a few students answered this question for me; a parent of one of my students came in and, looking at our inquiry “Wonder Wall” said that “this was the first topic her child had been excited about in a long time”. What? Are you serious? I thought my day had been made right then and there, my heart was glowing and I was so excited that I have engaged a student in a topic enough that they wanted to go home and tell their parents about their learning! Yes!! But my joy didn’t end there, later in the morning, another student was being taken out by their parent for an appointment, this student said to their parent “I need to be back this afternoon for Ms.Oreziak’s science lesson”. Just try to stop me from smiling from ear to ear after a comment like that! Other little comments popped up as well throughout the weeks, “are we doing science today Ms. Oreziak?” followed by groans if the answer was no and cheers if the answer was yes. The moral of why I am writing about this, is that no matter what, when you make a lesson and topic engaging and meaningful, students will understand that learning is actually fun, it is not simply “work”. Teachers need to work at engaging their students in a variety of ways. Routines get boring, it’s important to change things up, especially in the third term.

Moving forward, I need to maintain balance in my lessons. I am still a big advocate for promoting creativity and inquiry into the teaching and learning process, I think it is paramount to student engagement. Something that I have found to be a real challenge in implementing inquiry based learning is that it is easier to do when students can be independent. By this I mean, they are able to read, reflect, and research on their own. As a TC with a class of kindergarten and grade one students, my goal has become – teach students HOW to ask questions. My mentality going into inquiry was – come up with a question and explore it. Explore it how? If students come up with a big, overarching question, that is fantastic. Teachers can use that question to guide their teaching and help to create a theme within a unit. That way, we can explore the question within our lessons, as a class. Students that are 5,6 and 7 years old are not (for the most part) able to independently explore their questions in a formal manner.

I can feel myself questioning my practice on a daily basis, after some experience, I am curious to see how my inquiry topic evolves.