In preparing the students to write their news articles for their Provicinal Achievement Tests, I provided them with multiple scenarios they could pick from to write news articles for practice. I formatted the scenarios to look like the ones they would receive in their PAT’s, and chose topics to try and engage them with the material, so I could work on them with the students after their first draft to help hone their article writing skills.
This was a chart crafted with the students that was then given to them for use in their visual journals. It was comprised of the top half where the question was posed as to what their student elected city councillors did for their little craft city based on issues and promises made to the public, and then from research, we did as a class as to what our provincial MLA’s do for their constituencies.
Over the course of several days, I had students plan perform plays based around the concept of what would happen if some of their rights were taken away. It was used as an assessment of their learning from prior lessons, and also as a means to tie into their dystopian novels they were reading at the time.
When introducing the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, I had the class work through the concepts of Rights and Freedoms, and then as a class we developed our own Charter of Rights and Freedoms for the classroom to help demonstrate the process of crafting an important document and to show its value to the students.
This was a fun and informative lesson, as I took students through their rubric for their Provincial Achievement Test for their short stories, and explained to them why it’s important to write for an audience. I then took them through a list of things teachers like to read in their stories by asking a fellow teacher if she liked certain kinds of content in stories she read, to help guide them through what kind of content they should be trying to aim for in their stories.
In this lesson I had students sort the different services into which level of government provided them. The students had an opportunity to actively engage with the material, as they moved slips of paper containing the name of the service into a venn diagram made out of hula hoops.
In these two lessons, I took students through the Canadian provincial governments are structured, using a combination of lecture, interactivity, and body movement to engage different aspects of learning.
In my first semester of the education program at the Werklund School of Education, we were tasked with creating a photo essay to explain our thoughts at the time to the what teaching is and what teaching meant to us. This Photo Essay was my end result.
Jeff Medhurst 