Author: Kelsey Altwater

1. DANCEPL3Y workshop

• • • DANCEPL3Y (dance-play) develops physical literacy through dance using simple movements from a variety of world dance styles (Hip Hop, Urban, Ballroom, Aboriginal, Bollywood, African, Jazz/Funk) to develop Fundamental Movement Skills and foster positive mental health! Through playful group formations, teachers learn how to create engaging classes where students can develop confidence through dance, get interACTIVE with their peers and claim their “Bubble of Awesome”. There are only 3 Rules of PLAY to follow:  Be Positive, Be Fun, Be Yourself. Guaranteed to help meet the requirements for moderate to vigorous physical activity. During this full day workshop, teachers will experience a DANCEPL3Y program class, learn how to develop physical literacy through dance, and develop new verbal, physical and interpersonal coaching skills. The Master Trainer will focus on four main songs that feature a variety of music styles and fundamental movement skills. After this workshop, teachers will be ready to ‘plug and play’ their new skills and get students moving with simple dances from around the world! Teachers who participate in the 1-Day Pro-D Workshop can use the skills that they learned to lead engaging and high-energy dances with their students in their classrooms, or as part of their Physical Education, Dance or Music program.

1. Katy Bigsby’s Dealing with Difficult and Challenging Behaviours workshop

• • • Katy Bigsby has worked with children and youth with behavioural and social-emotional issues in school and community settings for the past 25 years.This is a foundational two-part training for new and existing front-line staff. The workshop included focusing on Proactive Strategies and ways to minimize challenging behaviour, and The Big 3, what to do when kids are: not listening, not participating, or being rude. Following this, we focused on Case Scenarios in which front-line staff will share what’s happening in their program and learn new strategies and solutions to support the kids with challenging behaviours in their current program. 

1. PLAY Kamloops and Sport for Life

• This workshop focuses on allowing the participants to understand the importance of physical literacy development for participants with disabilities. This workshop will take participants through what universally accessible programs are and how to plan and create them. It will also help participants to develop their adaptations to fundamental movement skills to allow for different disability types to participate and have a quality first involvement experience.

Star 1:

I would say the first area that I’ve shown the most growth in during this practicum would have to be my knowledge of child development at the kindergarten level. Coming into the practicum I really had no idea what I was coming into (as I had previously mentioned to you) and through having you and Tessica reviewing my lesson plans, I got a lot of feedback of concepts that the students don’t quite understand yet. For example, you both gave me great feedback on how the kindergartners don’t have a good understanding of age and seasonal changes (even though many may wish it was, Christmas is not a season) just to name a few. This was really insightful into how I should structure and organize many of my lessons. Another part of the children’s development that I didn’t know was such an impact before practicum was how important routine is to them. This got brought up in school recently, and young students feel a higher sense of security and control over their environment(s) when they have a routine to follow. Because the students have been conditioned into knowing what to expect (and what Mrs. Watson expects) during their day, their routine has been a very useful classroom management tool with Mrs. Watson’s kindergarten students. 

Star 2: 

I have really seen how strong of an impact creating a good relationship with your students can be. Always being supportive, positive, and praising students for doing their best work has really allowed the students to connect with me. I can see that the students recognize that I care about them; and in turn, the students show me kindness and respect. Something that really stands out to me when I think about this concept of creating good relationships with the students (especially kindergartners, many of which are leaving their families for the first time) is how connected they feel to us TC’s after only being with us once a week, for 6 weeks. Children come inside in the morning, recess, and lunch and immediately want a big hug and want to tell us about everything that’s happened since the last time we saw them! It is such a great feeling for me when the students are coming into the classroom so happy to see me and give me a hug, this really made me think about how important this is for them, and for me! If they are happy yo be here, I am happy to be here and vise versa! 

Wish: 

I am excited to continue to work on my lesson planning and how I can improve my ability to incorporate movement breaks and indigenous information to my teachings. I found it very admiring how Tessica is such a great role model to her TCs regarding incorporating brain and movement breaks, as well as indigenous context into the classroom everyday. From talking to some of my fellow TC’s, not everyone is as lucky as I am to have a TM as passionate about these aspects of education. I have made it my goal to continuously try new things and grow as a student and teacher, in order to best myself and my students. I think being aware of these aspects of the new curriculum and how to link these into our teaching practices would be much more difficult if I didn’t have someone like Tessica Watson as my mentor! I hope all my mentors are as great of a resource as Tessica has been throughout my time in her classroom.

To start off, I have to say that practicum has been super fun so far, I absolutely love my teacher mentor and the children in our classroom! My whole practicum experience has been such a humbling time of practice, patience, and learning on my end, and I am so thankful for that, and I can’t wait to see how much I will grow as a teacher and student in the next practicum. In week 2, I did my lesson plan based off the idea that we would be teaching the students about what an author and illustrator does, so through a very highly modeled lesson, the students made their own pumpkin books where they were the author, and the illustrator. The students are working really hard on their printing right now so we did some work as “word detectives” which allowed the students to be able to label their pumpkins. I had decided to take a huge risk with this lesson plan by trying to do something very intricate, something outside of the students comfort zones (they haven’t done anything like this before with their teacher), and a huge risk for me because I have never taught kindergarten before. It paid off, the lesson went amazing. All the prep I did for the lesson plan (which was a lot) was all worth it. The children were so engaged, focused, and overall they were very interested in the material, and it really showed in their work, and their work ethic during the activity. So like I mentioned, I was so happy with how it went, which was great, but it also reinforced to me how much work I have to keep putting in my lesson plans in order to find a way to interest the students. It isn’t even just interesting the students that was important. I think a big reason the children did well was because the activity was quite challenging, and the students pushed themselves to do their best work because they wanted to be able to do it.  This was my “aha” moment, I realized that students needed to be pushed outside their comfort zones and challenged, just as adults do. I was scared that the students weren’t going to be able to be “word detectives” and then write the words down to label their own pumpkins, but the students were all so excited about the work that they challenged themselves to do their best work. The students really supposed me with how much they could do, I created and prepped a lot of materials for students that I wasn’t sure how they were going to respond/react to the lesson plan, and I didn’t end up using and of my UDL supports from my lesson plan which blew me away! All the kindergartners were resilient, our students that we notice having behavioral difficulties and our student with an IEP all completed the same work as the rest of the class without having to use and of the universal designs for learning or differentiate instructions that I planned for the lesson which was a huge win in my books!

Coming into this practicum, I was very excited to start my first day of kindergarten, for the second time for many reasons. After doing my volunteer work in a grade 1 / 2 split, I thought I had a pretty good idea of what educating young children looked like (chaos and madness, with a whole lot of fun mixed in). But when I got my practicum placement to be in a kindergarten class, I had a really hard time trying to figure out what these students were going to be able to do. I wasn’t sure if they would know their letters, how to write their name or even hold a pencil already, so I knew I was just going to have to wait until my first day to see how developed students are after about 2 months of kindergarten. Mrs. Watson answered all our questions about the skills most kindergarten students coming into the school year, and what most of the skills the students will have at the end of the school year. I chose to write my reflection on this because for the first time, I really saw how vastly different students can be developmentally when they are coming into kindergarten. This understanding was confirmed even further once I finished doing individual assessments with the students on their number and letter knowledge. Some students can count to 13 and only know the letters in their name, whereas other students know all the letters in the alphabet and were able to count to 100. This was so interesting for me to see of course, but my “aha” moment came right after I did an evaluation, and the student asked me how old I am, and when my birthday was, and I followed up with him by asking how old he was, and when his birthday was. He let me know he was turning 6 right after Christmas. This was my “aha” moment. This young boy that just did very well on his assessment is just about 6, and some of the other students in the class are still waiting to turn 5, there’s just about a one year age difference in some of these children. This one year age difference does not seem to be that significant when we think of age differences in adults, or even teenagers. But for some of the kindergartners, they are 20% older (or younger) than the other children in the same class. I’m no expert on kindergarten yet, but being 20% older that your peers around you must have some advantage developmentally and experience wise when looking at a broad spectrum of students. Overall this really got me thinking about how when you are teaching the “young ones” in kindergarten, you have the very large responsibility of seeing where all the students are at in their first steps into their education, as well as making it as fun and accessible for all the students as possible. Something I also thought about after this “aha” moment, was you cannot blame or question the parents of these students that are maybe not doing as well as some of the other students. Rather we must help the students as much as we can, and give the parents the appropriate resources to help their children succeed to the highest degree possible if the parents are wanting our help and input!