Community Building and Our Classroom
At the beginning of the year, I see my classroom as a blank canvas. As the students enter, I become inspired by their work, personalities and energy to create a classroom environment that makes them feel safe and at home and which reflects who they are. I facilitate this through community building activities such as painting the classroom, establishing essential agreements and creating class banners. In the past few years, painting has become a theme that I have used, both in kindergarten and in Grades 3 and 4, for the students to express themselves and create an atmosphere of their own.
Click on the document below to read more about how my Grade 3 students collaborated to build the classroom and create the classroom banner as a team.
painting_of_the_murals_week_of_august_23rd_2010.pdf | |
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Dream Builders and the Four C's: Child, Creativity, Curriculum, and Community
During a one-on-one conference, I asked each child in the class to state their dream to me at the beginning of the year. Each student then made a vision board of their dream which was placed on the classroom wall for the year as a daily reminder of their goal. I became inspired to integrate the projects into Math, Language and Unit curriculum. The projects also included collaboration with teachers of other subject areas and integration of Physical Education, Art, Music and German curriculum. The projects encouraged student reflection, the unity of the school community and the feeling that anything is possible.
See My Dream Projects In Action!
Units of Inquiry: As a teacher that has taught in three different IB PYP international schools in three different continents, I am fortunate to have gained experience in developing and implementing Units of Inquiry. My experiences as a PYP teacher has developed my expertise in developing student-driven lessons, facilitating student inquiry, collaborating with colleagues of various departments and skills, and using a variety of assessment methods to gather insights into student knowledge. I have chosen to present three Unit of Inquiry that demonstrate my commitment to inquiry-based teaching. For further information on the IB and PYP programs please visit: www.ibo.org
The Central Idea of the Units of Inquiry of the three pictures below is: Schools are community of learners. In these photos, students use building blocks during a preassessment, with photos of people in the school, to create their idea of how the school is organized and how we all learn from each other. First, we discussed our thoughts as a whole group. Then students were divided into small groups to share their thoughts. To conduct a higher understanding of their knowledge, I observed and recorded anecdotal notes of their conceptions and misconceptions and used these notes to develop my lessons.
The Central Idea of the next Unit of Inquiry that I am showcasing is: Materials have unique elements have properties that are useful to our everyday lives. For this UOI, students explored materials found in sports equipment. I was inspired to explore materials found in sports equipment as many students demonstrated a strong enthusiasm for sports. In the pictures below, students visited the Design and Technology Department and welcomed a guest speaker to learn more about which materials were used for sports and how the properties of these materials contributed to the effectiveness of a sport. The concept that materials have various properties and that these materials are specifically used to enhance our lives was understood by the students through this exploration.
The Central Idea of the third Unit of Inquiry that I am showcasing is: Cities are made up of several systems that are connected. For this Grade 3 UOI, students brainstormed the various systems in a city and were divided into groups. Each group was responsible for creating the components of that particular system. The students then came together and decided as a group how to plan their city including where they would place elements of the city, how these systems would work together and why they chose to connect their systems in particular ways.
I connected Math to this Unit of Inquiry through an exploration of Perimeter. Students had been learning Perimeter and were asked to apply this knowledge to calculating the Perimeter of some of the 2D shapes that they found in their city. They were asked to record their calculations in their Math journals and on the 2D shapes that they had found.
Language was a big component of our Unit of Inquiry. I made several connections to our exploration of Language. Students explored poems and songs that expressed connection to city themes, they created a class city word list of words they wanted to learn how to spell and they partnered up to write, edit and present speeches to the class. The last language learning engagement was inspired by a notice that I was given by the school informing me that each class was required to elect a class representative. I used this as an opportunity for students to learn about persuasive writing, the election process, and the importance of voting. The class representative was elected by the class and that person became the mayor of the class city. As a final assessment, students created brochures for their city to entice people to come and visit it.
Diagnostic Tasks for Assessment, Documentation and Differentiation in Grade 3 Mathematics (Number)
Differentiation is of strong importance to my teaching in order for each student to progress at their individual level. Interviews and diagnostic tasks have provided me with excellent insight into the knowledge of my students. At my previous school in Berlin while teaching Grades 3 and 4, I used diagnostic tasks from the First Steps Approach to assess the level of my students. The same diagnostic task was used at the beginning of the year and the end of the year to determine the progress made over the year. The diagnostic task was based on word problems and allowed me to assess my students' understanding of which computation to use to solve a problem, the strategies used to solve the problems, their understanding of place value, their ability to solve the problem and articulate how the problem was solved and their level of confidence. At the end of the year, I shared the documentation with the students and they self-assessed their individual progress.
The following documents are transcriptions of three student interviews of different Math abilities as well as an analysis of their ability to solve the problems. The information I gathered from these interviews were used to establish my Math groupings.
student3_diag_task_for_website_.pdf | |
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student2_diag_task-_for_website.pdf | |
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student1_diag_2_for_website.pdf | |
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Below these photos is a keynote presentation I presented to the primary staff demonstrating my knowledge and passion for documentation as a means to make learning visible to students, staff and parents. To download my presentation, please click on the attachment below.
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File Type: | what is documentation |