A student used her senses to explore a toy bear and some rocks.

The child had been exploring at the playdough table for 10 minutes, and then she noticed the bear. Her Grandma just pushed the playdough away and placed the rocks and bear in front of her.

The child banged the rocks together and seemed interested in the sounds it made. After Grandma and others repeated, “It’s a bear”, the child confirmed her understanding and said, “A bear”. At one point, she put the bear in her mouth.

During free centre time, a student tried using a magnetic wand to move materials to the top of a plastic bottle.

During Free Centre time, this boy was at the light table with the plastic bottles filled with pipe cleaners and pompoms and a magnetic wand. He concentrated on his task, using the magnetic wand to bring the pipe cleaners up the bottle.  He said, “It’s going up!” -- he was able to bring 3 pipe cleaners up the walls of the bottle. He was also trying to get the pompoms to go up the wall.

Students worked with various materials to respond to the challenge, “How high can you stack it?”

A table was set up with four work surfaces; a wooden, square plate and 5 bowls of materials:  Flat rocks, corks, spools, wooden rings and cubes.  A prompt card with the question, “How high can you stack it?” was also at the table, to promote child/adult participation.  The work surface was kept small in hopes the children would stack up.

Primary students worked with a group of secondary students on an art piece that was built from the book We Are All Related.  The teacher talked with the children about their families, backgrounds, favourite things, and things they liked to do.

Students in an English First Peoples class were provided with choices for narrative essays they were asked to write. All topics related to aspects of the students’ lives. This sample is from a student responding to the prompt of “Belonging”.

Students were using Art Costa’s ‘Habits of Mind’ to help them identify and use common language around expected behavior in their learning community. Of the 16 Habits of Mind, their classroom focused on Listening with Understanding and Empathy, Managing Impulsivity, and Persisting and Thinking Flexibly. This sample depicts a student describing what persistence means to him and how it has been a part of his life.

Students in an English First Peoples class were asked to identify 4 artifacts that represented four areas of their lives: family, peer group, cultural heritage, and themselves as an individual. They needed to include photos that they took of the objects. They then chose three of the artifacts to describe on a blog and shared one in a sharing circle with the whole class.

A link to the assignment is found at: http://eng12fp.weebly.com/3/post/2013/09/stories-of-who-i-am-4-artefacts.html

Students began this project by thinking and talking about the needs of their community and how these needs are met. They then learned about the needs people have in their lives of belonging, fun, power and freedom (Glasser’s internal needs). They talked about how they meet these needs in their lives in positive ways, and created PowerPoint presentations to share with the class.

The teacher shared the model of an “I Am From” poem with students. Students wrote their own “I Am From” poems in their English class, and then worked in their Art class to create a mixed media self-portrait that reflected the imagery and information in their poems.

General information about “I Am From…” poems are available at

www.georgeellalyon.com/where

Students worked on a project that allowed them to explore many aspects of their lives to determine what makes them unique. They were asked to share information about any combination of the following topics: