Do you have a student in your classroom who can read and write in their home language, but are still learning vocabulary in English? Are you teaching a Core French unit and need a vocabulary list? This is a quick and easy way to translate multiple vocabulary words from English into your target language.  1. Go to your Google Drive and open a Google Sheet. 2. Down the first column, type the vocabulary words you want to translate, one vocabulary word per cell. 3. To translate into French, in the first cell of the second column, type the following: =googletranslate(A1,”en”,”fr") and hit ente ..read more

One of the challenges of understanding maps is making the jump from the image on the page to the reality of the world. This is especially challenging when it comes to scale, both distance and elevation. When we work on contour mapping, there are always several students in the class who have a hard time picturing how those lines on the map turn into hills, mountains, and valleys.  I decided to make the idea of contour mapping more concrete for them. Materials:  play-dough or plasticine in 4 or more different colours (one being blue) dark blue heavy-gauge poster board, cut to size p ..read more

Deepen conversations and thinking with Liberating Structures On May 21, Leyton Schnellert will present “Using Liberating Structures in Middle Years Classrooms to Deepen Learning” at the myPITA/BCATML Spring Mini-Conference. Liberating structures are strategies to facilitate conversations, which lead to increasing engagement, depth of sharing, and idea generation among participants. An example of a liberating structure is W3, which is a great debriefing strategy to use after a shared experience, progress check-in, and to generate ways of moving forwards on a repeated or long-term tas ..read more

Image: From BC Dairy Passport to Healthy Living resource package. Staying healthy looms large in people's minds right now. Between the very real worries students have around COVID and the mental health concerns surrounding the isolation we've been facing with so many restrictions on our usual behaviours in place, addressing the need to encourage  our students to prioritize increased health and well-being is important. We would encourage teachers to take some time to brainstorm with students regarding how they can help live healthy lives. Just seeing all the things that can (still) be do ..read more

This would have been the 40th anniversary of Terry Fox’s Marathon of Hope, and allowing COVID to disrupt Terry’s legacy seems incredibly wrong, especially when those who are living with cancer are among our most vulnerable. With no assemblies this year, and no mass gatherings, how to run Terry Fox Day at your school will require a little ingenuity! Here is one way that you can bring the Marathon of Hope to your school: Instead of a mass run on a single day, turn it into an extended event. Each class walks or runs a route (the distance around the outside edge of our field is 300m, for exampl ..read more

This is going to be one of the strangest starts to the year that BC education has ever faced. There are so many moving parts and as we go into this, so many of us are facing uncertainty and anxiety over what we should be planning for. Looking forwards, we can expect a few things to potentially occur, and hopefully planning for these events will help us feel like we have at least a tiny bit of breathing room. 1. Classroom community is key. Relationships are a huge part of what will make this year function, and it is important that this is where we start, even with the tension we will feel to p ..read more

These games assume that students are playing within their learning cohorts, and that sharing some equipment with minimal handling is permissible (not touching their face during games, washing hands afterwards to minimize the risks involved). They are adapted to allow for lack of physical touching, but many involve periodic movement to within 2m. As with any time you are organizing physical activities for large groups, consider the diversity in your classroom and make sure to pre-teach or adapt for students who would need help fully participating in the activity. 1. California Kickball/Basebal ..read more

Teaching is a profession that is an endless time sink. There is always something more we could do: our lessons could be more engaging; our worksheets could be more appealing; we could create more manipulatives for our math lesson; we could give more detailed feedback on those essays we’re marking. If teachers were given three extra hours a day, we could fill them with nothing but planning and still be wishing we had more time. Teaching is also a profession that draws on your emotional energy. We teach because we care, and caring for so many young people means that instead of having one, or tw ..read more

Before we start: It is important to know that everything in the world is made up of atoms and molecules, which are tiny, tiny pieces of matter, so small that we can’t see them. Background information: Solutions (and mixtures) diffuse: to spread out in every direction solute: the substance that is going to be dissolved solvent: the thing (in our case the liquid) that the solute is going to be mixed into in order for it to dissolve dissolve: to mix a substance (solute) with a liquid (solvent) so that the molecules of the substance diffuse through-out the liquid A mixture is when you combine ..read more

Recently, I was reading through an article on using Electronic Portfolios and my mind kept coming back to student self assessment. There are several elements of self-assessment that I have been turning over in my mind in the past few years, especially as we move more fully into the new curriculum. 1. Student self-assessment tends to be accurate. In my experience, this is true. In fact, I’d argue that students are usually harder on themselves, when it comes to assessing their ability levels and performance, than teachers are. This, however, relies upon the teacher having provided clear c ..read more