my educational journey

In my practicum, I was able to connect my teaching to all of the main Core Competencies of Communication, Creative Thinking, Positive Personal and Cultural Identity, and Critical Thinking. Below, I will discuss several examples of how I did so.

Communication

My students were able to make many connections to this competency through my units. They engaged in an Informational Literacy unit for Language Arts that was cross-curricular with Science. Through this unit, they learned about different kinds of writing, such as narratives, reports, and procedures. They were very familiar with these types of writing, but through learning more specifically about each one, they were better able to engage with the different kinds and they were able to identify each one through the writing’s specific and unique features. The fact that the unit crossed over with Science allowed the students to apply their knowledge in one area to learning about another. For example, in learning about bees, we read many reports about them in our guided reading groups which was an excellent experience because everyone was able to read about the subject at their own level, as well as assess the informational features of the writing. This unit also really allowed my students to develop a strong base in communicating better in writing, and strongly benefited all of them, but particularly my ELL students.

The students were also able to connect explicitly with Communication, Creative Thinking, and Positive Personal and Cultural Identity through a Scribjab project. What really amazed me about this project was that every single student was engaged throughout it–it connected them to technology, to each other, and to their own identities. They used their first languages as well as English to communicate. One of the most incredible things about Scribjab was that it was so multimodal–students could communicate orally if they had trouble writing, or they could spend tons of time on their drawings if they wished to. This project was accessible to every student regardless of how strong their academic abilities were. Here are a few examples of projects my students did.

mi vida | my life
No Story 2 The sequel | No Story 2 ang sumunod na pangyayari
All about Leeya | 我是张李雅

Creative Thinking

My fellow Teacher Candidate, Merve Ozkan, and I received a grant for a pottery project proposal called the Emily Longworth Memorial Award (I talk more about it here). The grant made it possible for us to team-teach a cross-curricular Social Studies and Art pottery unit that cumulated in a field trip to a pottery studio where students were able to engage with the pottery-making process in surroundings where it is made on a daily basis. I absolutely loved teaching with Merve. This project allowed me to make connections with her class of grade 1s and 2s, and for our students to connect with each other. We also taught them about how a First Nations artist named Larry Grant engages with his identity through pottery, and the students were able to express themselves creatively through several art pieces.

Positive Personal and Cultural Identity 

My traditional stories unit (found in my unit plan section) was a rewarding experience for my students where they were able to successfully and positively engage with their personal and cultural identity. We read stories that connected with my students’ ethnic backgrounds, and originated from all over the world–Japan, China, the Philippines, and India, to name a few. We also read stories that allowed students to engage with the competency of Critical Thinking, through examining different cultural ways to tell stories. For example, not all stories have a beginning, middle, and end; this is a Western perspective on storytelling. We discussed this concept through reading stories like The Little Hummingbird by Michael Yahgulanaas, where the story displays a First Nations style of storytelling and does not have an ending. We also looked at different cultural storytelling styles, through books like Beautiful Blackbird by Ashley Brian, which I retold in Brian’s own style. The students loved this unit. They were all meaningfully engaged and I was invoking inquiry simply by engaging their curiosity about themselves, each other, and their backgrounds. The unit was also summed up by the Scribjab project, which connected strongly to this competency.

Critical Thinking

I believe this competency was most apparent in my Science unit on Bees and Biodiversity. I captured my students’ curiosity first through an extremely engaging episode of The Magic School Bus by which students were left with many questions, and beginning our first cycle of inquiry. I asked the students to write all their questions on post-it notes, which I put on a curiosity wall in the classroom. We watched many videos answering some of the students’ questions, about life cycles, different kinds of bees, habitats, and so on. The students’ questions never stopped, which was fantastic. We explored them further through guided reading lessons, where students read books about bees that catered to their individual learning levels. The critical thinking aspect really came in when we began to examine why bees are disappearing, and what the consequences will be. We used the Jigsaw method when groups of students explored different images of environmental degradation and discussed the reasons, impact, relevance and connection of the images with our unit. This unit served to foster a sense of critical responsibility in my students, by helping them understand their personal impact on the environment and any little thing that they could do to help.