Educators demonstrate a broad knowledge base and an understanding of areas they teach.

Throughout my Education 391 practicum, I was given Literacy and Science as two areas in BC’s curriculum to teach from. I was in a grade 2/3 classroom at Peden Hill, and couldn’t wait to create mini unit plans for each subject. After collaborating with my coaching teacher, we decided that I would focus on the elements of a story for Literacy and the water cycle for Science. As soon as I could, I started to gather information through resources I have been given, websites online, and even fellow teachers in the district that I knew. I was able to gain tons of age appropriate books from the Prince George Library, and copied some amazing resources and templates from a grade 2/3 teacher I knew in the district. I found that collaborating and asking experienced teachers in this grade level was one of the best resources I could have used, as they were able to give me tips and tricks for ideas that worked well/didn’t work well in the past. After gathering all that I could, I got to work on creating adaptations and injecting in my own personality into the mini lessons I was teaching.  I love to use books as a starting off point with my primary grades, so ensuring that I found stories that either introduced or complemented my lesson of the day was very important to me. I also found that my students inparticular loved to read stories and quite often just automatically sat at the carpet in anticipation for one of my lessons. Literacy was a lot of fun for me, as I have collected quite a stack of awesome children’s books over time. I made sure that I was continually checking in with the content and curricular competencies within the language arts curriculum, so that my lesson plans were meeting expectations for what the students needed to cover and know by the end of this unit.  With a very diverse range of kids both academically and behaviourally, I knew it was important to create lessons that kept the students engaged but didn’t involve a ton of writing at one time. Since I was teaching story elements, I stuck to the curriculum and only assessed my students on their ability to comprehend the elements of a story, rather than spelling, sentence structure etc.  Throughout my unit lesson on the water cycle, I tried to tie in as many local examples of land-based learning and experiences they would be familiar with. We used the names of local rivers, mountains and lakes so the students could make a deeper connection to the material being taught.

Photo Credit: Lia Chappell

As teachers, I think it’s important to not only teach to the given curriculum laid out for us, but take ownership of this by creating more thoughtful and connected lesson plans for our students to relate to. Embracing our local cultures, languages and perspectives is imperative to providing our students a learning journey that values where we live, work and play. Utilizing outside knowledge and expertise is something I want to embrace throughout my teaching career, as some teachings are done best from those who are experts in the field.  I don’t ever want to claim that I know everything and anything when it comes to our student’s capacity to learn, therefore collaboration with other teachers, and experts in our community is very important to me. I think by recognizing and embracing this as a new teacher will help create greater opportunities for my students and allow me the chance to build my knowledge base and a deeper understanding of the areas I teach.