For this week, I did a mini lesson on how to create a bibliography. The grade 6 and 7 students had been taught early on in the year how to create one, but their teacher had assigned an essay assignment and the due date was coming up. I wanted to go over one more time the proper way to create a bibliography so that the students were refreshed on the topic.
I started off with a ten minute PowerPoint presentation and I had a fill-in-the-blank handout for the students to complete as I was presenting. This allowed the students to work on note-taking, but it also let me know that they were on task and engaged. Many students in the classroom are EAL and taking long sets of notes right now is too difficult and then they focus more on writing and less on the topic that is being presented. After that, I provided the students with a mini research assignment to do. I am fortunate to be placed in a classroom that has one-to-one laptops for all the students. The students were excited to be able to use technology. They were asked to research five topics (which I provided) and then record the title of the page, the author if they could find it, the link, and record the date they accessed the information. This task was used to help them remember to record the data from their source before they move on to another source. The students were provided 40 minutes for the activity and if they finished it, they were allowed to work on their essays. The task was assigned for homework and only four students were unable to finish in the time provided. My coop asked me if I would feel comfortable grading them and I said yes. The majority of the students did extremely well and I was happy to see that they were excited about their marks. Some students who usually do not do as well did quite well with some help on the assignment I created. I was happy to be able to grade my first set of assignments. I found the system of Enriched Understanding, Meeting, Beginning, and Not Yet a little bit confusing, but I discussed my concerns with my coop and he explained them in detail afterward for future assignments that I will be grading.
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I decided to donate food to the food bank in my home community twice instead of alternating and donating in Regina because my k-12 school is doing a fundraiser for Halloween called "Scare Off Hunger." The idea for "Scare Off Hunger" came from the Me to We organization.
The food drive is going door-to-door in Allan and since my family lives on a farm, I left some food with my mom to drop off at my grandma's in town so that it can be picked up while I am back in Regina for classes. I do consider donating in Regina a priority, but I also want to contribute to food drives in the community that I grew up in. It would be amazing if we did food drives more often, rather than just for special occasions. We would likely be shocked at how many members in the community are willing to donate when someone actually comes to their home to pick up the donation. People sometimes tend to use travel and making time to donate as excuses to not do it. Our second day was much different than the first. We finally had the opportunity to meet all of our students and interact with them in their classroom. I found myself spending most of my time trying to remember everyone's name and their seating arrangement. Our introductory lesson was creating individualized poems with the students and then some group work and sharing regarding the expectations that they have for us as their teachers. I noticed after our lesson that we could have been more clear with both instructions for the tasks as well as time management.
I was greeted at recess break by a very talkative kindergarten student and I must say that he definitely put a smile on my face as he was telling me all about himself. Even though I do not specialize in teaching the little ones, it was still nice to interact with a younger student. We taught our second lesson in the afternoon and we had a choice on what we would teach together. We chose to teach about the water cycle. We had some prerequisite questions for the students and then we watched a short video together. We created definitions together as a class for evaporation, transpiration, condensation, precipitation, and ground water. The students had many great ideas and had lots of background knowledge on the subject. We then did an art activity/visual representation activity with the students. We created small diagrams of the water cycle on a sheet and then folded it a certain way that if you opened a flap of the paper, the definition would be underneath. We unfortunately did not even have enough time to complete the drawing portion because the students had to go out for recess. Our coop teacher said that the lesson would be finished at another date and we need not worry that we ran out of time. The students seemed to not understand our instructions on how to draw the diagram as a cycle or leave room on the page for the definitions. I think for the second lesson we also needed to explain instructions better. Overall, we had a pretty good first day for teaching two lessons in one day to some students that we had barely even gotten to know. Our coop said that even though our science lesson did not carry out as planned, we did okay for a first time teaching lessons to students. After all, we are still learning too. On the first day of pre-internship, we went to Sacred Heart Roman Catholic Church in Lebret, Saskatchewan. We had a tour of the church as well as some insight into the history of Lebret and how the Qu' Appelle Valley received its name. We then had a brief lunch outside and then participated in the Stations of The Cross on the hillside.
We ended the day with the choice of either playing "prey and predator" or doing a scavenger hunt in the cemetery. The students that participated in the field trip were the grade 7's and 8's whereas the classroom that we are in is grade 6/7. The field trip did not allow us to truly get to know our students because not all of them were present. We did not discuss the Lebret Residential School even though we were very close to the site. This somewhat bothered me because the site was so close and so important. The students would have greatly benefitted from the learning experience. The game and scavenger hunt were both fun activities, but visiting the Lebret Residential School would have incorporated some curriculum outcomes and indicators as well as beneficial knowledge. This past week has been very busy for me, yet I did find time to finally make my first donation to the food bank. I donated to the food bank in my local community of Allan, Saskatchewan. The donating process was actually a lot more difficult than I thought that it would be. I never would have thought that donating in a small community of 650 people would be more difficult than donating in a larger city such as Regina.
When I opened my pantry at home, I found a large amount of expired crackers, juice, Jell-O powder, instant pudding mix, peanuts, etc. Coming from a family of five, I have noticed over the years that my family always tends to buy food without looking in the pantry to see if we already have what we need at home. It is almost as if we tell ourselves that if we buy more it will not be a problem because if we have some at home too, there will just be plenty of food. My mother was mortified to see me throw out a full garbage bag of expired food from our pantry. I mentioned in my first blog post that I wanted to donate to the food bank because too often food goes to waste (likely in more households than just mine) and that food could have easily been donated and gone to an individual or family who could really use it. I take so much for granted and I was still able to come up with a care package to take to the local food bank. My small community does not have convenient drop off times or multiple locations for drop off which made it very difficult for me to actually donate. There is a donation box at the back of our local church (which is only open on Sundays) and there is a box at Allan Composite School, but that location is only open during school hours. I took my donation to the local Co-op to find out that the donation box that they had is no longer being used as a pick up location. I also found out that there is only one person in my community that is taking charge of distributing food to the 16 local families that need it because no one else wants to take on the task. This news was very disheartening to hear. Small communities such as my own need more people to take action and be engaged citizens as well. I have reflected lots this past week on how it is easy to say that you will do something, but it is a lot harder to actually go out and take the action. I thought donating to the food bank was going to be “easy” to commit to, but it is actually becoming a lot more difficult to incorporate into my schedule. I have been reflecting on how my pledge will directly affect me as a pre-service teacher. I will gain skills on not only balancing responsibilities, but also on focusing on the lives of others. I focus so much of my time on my own life and as a future teacher, I will need to focus on the well-being and lives of my students as well. I will need to observe the needs of not only myself, but also of my students.
Last week we were asked to reflect on whether our pledges were a normative narrative of being an engaged citizen. My pledge is definitely a generic idea that people come up with when they initially think about being an engaged citizen. I am not assuming that I am simply a good citizen if I donate to the food bank and I can accept that donating to the food bank is not necessarily a unique way to give back to my communities. However, I do not think that my pledge is not as good as someone else’s because my pledge works for me. I am still going out of my way to do something to benefit my community and that is more than I could say I was doing a few months ago. Last week I was unable to carry out my pledge. It is not that I simply did not want to, but I spent the weekend in the hospital in Saskatoon with my grandfather who was just recently admitted on Tuesday. Sometimes we need to recognize and accept that “life gets in the way” and tampers with our plans. I had to think about my priorities and what was more important at the given time. As a teacher, I also need to be understanding and open with my students if they are struggling and need some extra time too. I decided that donating to the food bank in Regina once every month would allow me to be an engaged citizen in my community. That being said, I also pledged to donate to my local food bank back home. Every two weeks I will alternate between donating to the two food banks. I was thinking about how so many people had specific pledges and mine was to "donate to the food bank," but it was not nearly specific enough. I needed to set a real goal that was achievable for me.
This goal is achievable for me because I would not be pushing myself to donate so often to the point that I was feeling stressed financially, but it allows me to be generous (even in small portions) twice every month. I tend to go home multiple weekends as well, so donating to the members of my own community will be achievable. I wanted to not only focus on my current community here in Regina, but also on the families in the hometown that I was born and raised. This thought allowed me to reflect on the fact that there is a heavier focus on providing food to areas with larger populations, and the smaller communities sometimes get pushed aside. I have seen low income families struggle in my hometown, yet I have had plenty provided to me. I want to be able to support both communities that have supported me as I have grown up. My pledge to create positive action in my community is to start donating to the food banks in both Regina and my hometown of Allan, Saskatchewan. I will learn more about this topic by finding locations that donations can be dropped off at as well as doing personal research as to why certain groups of people rely on the food bank more than others. I also would like to know how much food is in demand by the needs of the citizens of Regina. I could also elaborate further and find out which organizations in Regina currently donate to the food bank.
I chose this pledge because I feel that too many people only donate to the food bank when a large fundraiser is going on or they do not donate at all. I personally have reflected on my own experiences and the last time I donated to the local food bank. I have not donated to the food bank in the last three years. I think it would be so beneficial for me to just focus on some people other than my own family and myself all the time. I have the means to donate to the food bank more than just once or twice a year. I’m not committing myself to donating mass amounts of food, but even the smallest donation can make a difference in someone’s life. I have seen on too many occasions in my own home that food gets wasted and thrown out because it spoils before anyone eats it. My commitment connects to curriculum outcome RW8.2 in the Social Studies section of the Saskatchewan Curriculum. My pledge connects to outcome (f), which is to “represent a personal change related to responsible consumption integrated into personal life.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=30W6M_NV8J8
When I took mathematics in elementary and high school I never considered the lessons to be oppressive or discriminatory. I never questioned if we needed to be learning FNMI methods of tackling mathematics because it was not my job to be teaching the course and looking into that. The Saskatchewan 20 and 30 level mathematics curriculum does not state that students need to learn FNMI methods of tackling mathematics. I personally feel that teachers spend most of their time teaching mathematics in high school as quickly as they can to cover all the topics because provincial examinations are unpredictable. I wrote 30 level provincial departmental examinations in mathematics. My class rushed through course content because my teacher was in his second year of teaching and was not certified to be creating his own exams. I do not think that any teachings were meant to be oppressive, but my mathematics class had only five students (four students being White and one student being Asian). I never questioned if other cultures or groups of people did math differently. I was under the assumption that there was just one way to do it. I found it very interesting when Gale brought up in lecture that Inuit people use base 20 when doing mathematics. I never realized there was a world outside of base 10 until university.
Three ways in which Inuit mathematics challenges Eurocentric ideas about the purpose of mathematics are:
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