10 Days - 10 Realisations

It have been two weeks of working at my new school so I decided to write a reflective post about the past two weeks. Below are some things that I have enjoyed, found interesting, or compared with other schools I have worked at:

1. Year 7 students are really young: I had a little bit of first day nerves and as soon as I saw the students, my nerves went away as I realised that most of the students I would be teaching are still kids. Thus, I could use quite a bit of my primary teaching skills with the middle year classes.

2. Year 9 students are the same in Canada and Australia: Since Year 9 is the first year of high school in Canada, students come in with a mix of attitude and apprehension (both excited to be in high school, but also go back to being the little fish after a year of being the top dogs). I guess I thought that year 9 students in Australia wouldn't have the same issues. Well, I have found that regardless of it is your first year in high school or not, Year 9 students are the same! It must be an age thing. It can sometimes be tricky to teach this year level as you are dealing with students moving from a pre-teen to teenager stage. So I am bound to use my charm and skills to work with my year 9's and get them on board!

3. Relationships, relationships, relationships: From when I first started teaching to now, one of the most important lessons I have learnt is that teaching is all about relationships. Whether it is a primary school class or high school class, students need to be able to trust their teacher and feel comfortable in their classes. My first week in the new school was tough as I had gone from knowing all the students in my year level (even those I didn't teach) and having such a strong presence with them, to starting fresh. I guess I wasn't prepared for that feeling and the huge realisation that I now need to build new relationships with my new students. Week two was much better as I became more familiar to the students and we have started to build an excellent working relationship. Some students who gave me a tough time in week one have become my biggest fans in week 2.

4. Time: High school teachers have less contact time and more planning time. I cannot stress how important it is for teachers to adequate time to plan and organise their classes. With this planning time, teachers are able to really focus on their lessons and create more engaging and exciting lessons for their students.

5. My height: Since I am teaching high school students now, I feel even more shorter than I did teaching primary school. I just need to maintain my presence in the classroom and everything will be alright!

6. Team teaching/planning: One thing I loved about teaching in a primary school was working so closely with my team to plan and teach lessons. In high school, the ability to work with other teachers teaching the same classes is far less. Perhaps this will be my challenge, to be able to work with other teaching the same courses to maintain consistency and to have professional dialogue and sharing of ideas to strengthen our course.

7. Support for Students: My new school (from what I have seen) has a great team of support staff that are there to work with students in addition to teachers. It is so important to have other staff members at the school that are able to assist students in both their academic and social success. Sometimes as teachers, it is difficult to give students the one-on-one attention that many need, so having a welath of support workers is wonderful to ensure that students are enjoying their schooling.

8. A library/resource centre: Oh how I love the library! Books, books, such wonderful things! In two weeks, I have read such a large number of novels for my classes.

9. Canteens: Canteen food is canteen food...it doesn't matter where you are! (canteen = cafeteria for my North American friends)

10: I love teaching!: It is a little strange how excited I get about planning new lessons and finding cool ideas and strategies for teaching new skills. I absolutely love it, perhaps a little too much. Prime example: I am beginning my literacy and numeracy intervention program next week and needed to create my own timetable. Well I created three different ones, just because I didn't know which one I thought would be best for the students. Yup, that's me! Although teaching can get the best of you at times, I don't know what else I would rather do :)

Some Very Big News...

As some of you may have noticed, I haven't been posting in a while. The end of Term 2 was a very busy time with report cards and parent-teacher interviews but I also had something else my mind was focusing on...securing a new job!

Yes, that's right folks, I have made the big decision to change schools and positions. As of July 15th (the beginning of Term 3), I will be starting a new position at a high school! So that means that I am making the big transition from primary to secondary and I am so excited about this move. My teaching methods are actually secondary and I did teach years 10 -12 in Canada. I now will be given the opportunity to teach years 7-9 in Australia and perhaps even higher next year. Not only will I be working in a high school again, I also have been put in charge of designing and organising a literacy and numeracy intervention program for my new school, and I will be working on this with one of my previous teaching mentors. So, needless to say, I have been busy planning and coming up with brilliant ideas for my new role. 

What does this mean for my blog? Well, it might be taking a new direction in regards to the type of posts and activities I will be sharing. But I do promise to try my best with blogging and sharing new strategies and lessons that can be modified and adapted to different year levels. As you can imagine, I may be a little busy as I begin my new role, but I will try to update you on how it's going and what I am working on with my new classes.

Hope everyone in Australia has a great term break and all my American and Canadian followers have a great summer break!!!

Renaming Whole Numbers

When teaching place value, I believe that it is truly important that students are able to rename a number. If they can do that, it shows the students' understanding of the number. 

Here is what I mean by renaming. My example number is 253. 

Students should be able to identify that 253 can be represented as:

253 ones

2 hundreds 5 tens 3 ones
2 hundreds 53 ones

25 tens 3 ones

As a challenge for my upper primary students, I asked them to rename whole numbers of six and seven digits. I organised this activity as a challenge between groups; the group that was able to rename the number in most amount of ways won. One point was allocated for every correct renaming of their numbers. 

Although at first, it was a bit of a struggle, once groups got into it, they really impressed me with their skills. I also was able to see that some students need to work on their spelling on larger numbers. This was a great activity though to truly identify which students full understood place value.

Our Values and 5 Star Work

Although this is an old item, it is something that we do at the beginning of every school year and that I believe I will continue to do with every class that I have. I think that in order to establish routine and expectations in a class, it is important to set out the values that are determined by the students themselves.

Here are the values we created this year: 

We value positivity, acceptance, co-operation, respect, honesty and organisation.

We also create a criteria for what qualifies as five star work in maths, reading, writing, handwriting and independent work. These are posted in the classroom and are referred to while students on working on activities in all subject areas. Before students can submit work for marking, they need to check that they have created five star work. 

Q

Comparing and Contrasting Text

Like I mentioned previously, I really wanted to start finding great texts to use for teaching different skills in reading. In my post about Cause and Effect, I used some texts that worked really well. 

 

For teaching comparing and contrasting, I absolutely love the book "Mirror" by Jeannie Baker. It is a lovely book of comparisons between an Australian family and one in Morocco. The book is designed so you can see the pictures and story simultaneously. It also opens "left to right" as English books do, for the Australia story, and then opens"right to left" so you read in Arabic. 

It truly highlights both difference and similarities between families living in these two different countries and cultures. An absolutely wonderful story to use for comparing and contrasting and so many activities that can follow-up with it. 

Follow-up: Venn diagram, T-chart, self-to-text connections, etc. etc.

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This website has a great blurb about the text and also some great activities: http://www.literacyandnumeracy.gov.au/mirror

Shopping in Morocco

Shopping in Australia

Comparing and Contrasting

I begin my unit on comparing and contrasting in reading on Monday. Below is my "Comparing and Contrasting" anchor chart. Fingers crossed that all my activities will work. I will post a follow-up with more comparing and contrasting ideas :) 

Place Value Poster

This idea is from Runde's Room's Interactive Maths Journals. When teaching whole number place value, I created a place value columns poster based on Runde's idea. The slight difference is that I added the place value houses as I believe it is an added teaching tool for place value.

I used this poster when working with small groups to help them read and recognise whole numbers up to six digits. My students eventually made their own posters and we were able to have small competitions with our posters. In small groups, I would read a number to the students and they had to create the number with their number pullouts on their poster. Other teachers in my area have used the place value posters in their maths class as well with great success. It is an easy poster to create and you are able to model so much with it. Definitely worth the time creating it!