Nihon no Okami: A Game to Teach about Japanese History and Worldviews

I have previously posted about a game we found to teach about Japanese history called Warlords of Japan. In grade 8 social studies in Alberta, our curriculum focuses on worldviews and the things that shape them and change them. We do a case study about Japan, focusing on the Edo and Meiji periods to learn about a period of government-imposed isolation and then the subsequent adaptation and modernization...

Studio Art Process

 I teach an art option class in addition to my Humanities teaching load. I love teaching art. It's such a relaxing pause in the day, when I just get to help kids create.This year, Covid has thrown a bit of wrench into option scheduling. Typically, students rank their option choices and get placed in courses they're interested in. Because we need to keep kids in their homeroom cohorts, we've moved...

From Safe to Brave

 A couple of years ago, we started our year in grade 8 Humanities by having the students create a user manual. It was good, but it missed the mark in a couple of ways, namely, the students didn't use them beyond the assignment. In an effort to more purposefully set students up for the work they would do throughout the year in Room to Breathe, we hacked it, and came up with From Safe to Brave.The...

Developing Classroom Norms

 We know that establishing a culture of trust in a classroom is a prerequisite for creativity to flourish. Among one of the things my grade 8 team has done to establish a culture of trust at the beginning of the school year is to develop a set of grade 8 norms. We were inspired by a video we saw from Edutopia about a teacher in Maine who did something very similar with his students. We have developed...

#NeedATeacherAskATeacher: Informal Mentorship as Support for Pre-Service Teachers During the Time of COVID19

As the world turned sideways a few weeks ago with COVID19, teachers with students from K-12 and post secondary responded with collaborative spirit, professionalism, optimism, and love. The hashtag #NeedATeacherAskATeacher was created by a group of educators and leaders soon after schools closed indefinitely in Alberta as a way to support practicing teachers and parents who were navigating...

Room to Breathe (R2B): Personalizing the Language Arts through Student-Designed Projects

This post was updated in February 2021. The Origin Story My teaching partner Tara and I knew we needed to redesign the way we taught Language Arts to our grade 8 students this year. What we had been doing was okay, and we did some pretty neat things with our kids, but it certainly wasn't streamlined, and engagement was pretty variable, depending on the task. So we went away in the summer with lots...