The Learning Bin

A teacher is never really on vacation, because even when I'm playing Legos with my nephew we're having a learning experience. While eating a morning snack last week we watched a YouTube video shot by a drone of a flooded stone quarry. We could see abandoned vehicles under the surface of the water. Today H recreated an abandoned under water vehicle scene in the living room.

It’s teacher appreciation week and I urge everyone to really take a minute to think about your child’s teacher.   What do you know about them?   What do your kids know about them?   Some of my best and most useful gifts have come from families who really knew something about me. **Please note, I’m not saying gifts are a must, just saying for those of you that do show appreciation in this way, make the present fit the person.** Top Teacher Gifts that I have received in my decade of teaching: A brightly patterned orange backpack. (My favourite colour is orange, which the children all know from color lessons. I also travel a lot so a nice carry on sized backpack is a great thing to have.   I’ve used this gift 100s of times). Acute teacup with an assortment of tea. (I drink tea every morning, and throughout most of my parent teacher conferences…I used this gift and enjoyed it.)   A travel mug and Starbuck card (Same as above with the tea, an...

This morning we used three of our senses to figure out what "A" and "B" cups contained. We used our eyes to observe that both cups had white crystals. We use our fingers to feel that both cups held things that felt rough. The big differences came when we tasted. One was salty and one was sweet. Based on all of our observations we identified the substances as sugar and salt. To finish up our discussion we named different salty or sweet snacks and talked about how different people like different tastes.

A big shout out to the art teacher at my school who has been working with my kiddos once a week to create amazing visuals. This is a self portrait series that highlights emotions, can you guess what they are?

This year for the PTO fund raiser I made a giant mural/collage with the class.  We brain stormed everything that was in our community, and each cut out and decorated homes and buildings to add into the piece.  Once it was compiled and stuck down to a large cardboard sheet with glue, the teaching team mod-podge painted over the entire thing 3 times to get the seal and coverage we needed for it to survive in our humid climate. I especially like the swimming pool with the diver! This piece now resided outside the main door of the early childhood centre at our school.

This year for Halloween I had both families who were avid celebrators of the holiday, and those who did not celebrate it at all.  To find a nice compromise we did a book study of "Room on the Broom" written by Julia Donaldson and illustrated by Axel Sheffler. I wrapped the idea around friendship and kindness rather than Halloween and everyone was happy. To make the bulletin board I used the fairy tale printable boarder from Sparkle Box UK, http://resources.sparklebox.me.uk/7000-8000/sb7597.pdf Then I layered construction paper to make the broom and took pictures of the students, teacher, and aides all sitting sideways on a chair against a blank background.  The children asked to add in the animals so I simply copied their pictures from our copy of the book. There are so many wonderful resources for this story and I can't speak more highly of the short film that was made in 2012, it is wonderful!