Student exemplar of our nativity scenes that were made leading up to Christmas in my Fall 2022 placement.
My artifact for Professional Practice is a combination of the three health lessons I delivered on ‘Making Healthy Choices’ and “A Plan Towards Healthy Eating & Factors that Influence a Healthy Lifestyle’ for my grade 5/6 class. What is different about my lesson plans is that they begin with a short introductory presentation covering unprocessed and processed foods with leads into an interactive game for the students to engage in and allow them to become involved in the lesson.
This lesson was extremely successful not only for me but for my students as well. They really started to understand the concept of making healthy choices throughout the delivery of my lessons. They got to play a health-related game with their teams in the class, and everyone was having so much fun, and that is what I want a health class to encompass.
In my lessons, I constantly ask questions which I felt led to more discussion as a class than just me teaching. Class discussions worked best for this group because that is what they’re used to. It starts with whole group learning, small group, to then individual work which connects to Vygotsky’s theory of scaffolding. This is highly important especially with young humans. They become intimidated very quickly by new information.
Attached above are the “Daily Eating Tracker’ and ‘Scenario Questions’ that students were able to work through following our health lesson on A Plan Towards Healthy Eating & Factors that Influence a Healthy Lifestyle.
Attached above is the exemplar restaurant menu that I made for the students to view to get an idea of how they should depict their healthy restaurant menu for this assessment. Along with the menu were the success criteria that were distributed to the students prior to them completing their restaurant menus. This allowed them to have criteria to follow while working on their assessment making sure they complete all the points and allows for self-evaluation and self-reflection once finished.
Daily Schedule Placement 2021
During my placement, I had the opportunity to teach some half days with the schedule looking similar to what is attached above. I chose this to be my artifact because I remember feeling so nervous about this next step of teaching half the day while introducing a new topic with sometimes little interest. I remember thinking I couldn’t do it. When I discussed this with my associate teacher, she said she felt the same when she began teaching, as everyone does. That feeling of doubt and nervousness is normal, especially when it comes to teaching a completely new subject. When I finished this day, I felt like a teacher. I felt ready to take on any class.
My number one goal as a teacher is to be engaging with my students. Offering opportunities to the students aside from myself just lecturing or speaking to them such as group discussions, guiding questions, and interactive games to test their knowledge. This past year has taught me to yes, be a professional, but to acknowledge that I am a human, teaching students lessons that may not be as interesting should include fun and engaging methods to keep the student’s focus directed towards the lesson.