[September 2021-2023] UNBC Bachelor of Education (Elementary) Program Template
 
E³ - Em's Educational Experience

Standard 6

Educators demonstrate a broad knowledge base and an understanding of areas they teach.

Thanks to my UNBC pro­gram, I am well-versed in under­stand­ing the Big ideas, Core com­pe­ten­cies and the BC Cur­ricu­lum Con­tent.
Dur­ing my final practicum, my les­son unit plans for Math and Sci­ence specif­i­cal­ly tar­get­ed new areas of learn­ing for my stu­dents. How­ev­er, this was a chal­lenge, as only a quar­ter of the class was ready to move onto the next step in Math due to low numer­a­cy skills. FPPL states, “learn­ing takes patience and time.” While I ini­tial­ly want­ed to move to sub­trac­tion by the end of my practicum, it was evi­dent the stu­dents still need to prac­tice their addi­tion when adding num­bers to ten, to build their num­ber flu­en­cy and men­tal math skills. My lev­el of Math is far exceed­ing the ele­men­tary lev­el, but I feel it is impor­tant to try and dis­till the con­cepts and let stu­dents try var­i­ous ways of solv­ing prob­lems. It is equal­ly impor­tant to pro­vide stu­dents a path to suc­cess. For Valen­tine’s Day, I designed a way to visu­al­ly prac­tice decom­pos­ing 5s or 10s which mapped the two addends and their sum.

Stu­dents move the hearts into the addend box­es to map to dif­fer­ent math equa­tions that add up to ten. This can work in reverse as cal­cu­la­tor visu­al aid where you place the hearts into the addend first, then move them to the sum box and count how many there are in total.

For my Sci­ence unit, stu­dents explored the prop­er­ties of every­day objects and the spe­cif­ic effects of mag­net­ism. This was per­haps the must excit­ing and engag­ing of all my lessons for the class. Mag­nets are mag­ic in the eyes of kinder­garten kids, and I loved let­ting them explore through play and exper­i­ments. My first les­son intro­duced mag­nets and mag­net­ism, and stu­dents would use fish­ing rods (rulers with mag­nets to try to pick up every­day objects). They would first pre­dict if it could be picked up, and then try to do so. Some met­als like alu­minum are not mag­net­ic so some stu­dents ran to me when they could not pick up the met­al key exclaim­ing, “Mr. Georges! My mag­net is bro­ken!” Through play, stu­dents learned how mag­net poles attract or repel each oth­er. One stu­dent even dis­cov­ered that he could make a paper­clip become mag­net­ic!

Through guid­ed dis­cov­ery learn­ing stu­dents had mag­net­ic Slime races, mag­net­ic fish­ing for paper clips, and explor­ing how the mag­net­ic North and South poles work. Stu­dents also were giv­en time for play with the mag­nets to make their own sculp­tures and objects.

Here are the links to the K — Sci­ence Unit Plan and its Les­son Plan:
K — Sci­ence Unit Plan — Mag­net­ism
http://egeorges.opened.ca/wp-content/uploads/sites/3572/2023/04/Science-K-UNBC-Unit-Plan-Mar-2023-Magnetism-EGEORGES.pdf
K — Sci­ence — Dis­cov­ery Les­son : Mag­net­ism
http://egeorges.opened.ca/wp-content/uploads/sites/3572/2023/04/EGEORGES-Science-Lesson2-UNBC.Lesson-Magnetism.2023-Prior-Reflection.pdf
Stu­dents use a mag­net under the race track to move the Drag­on Quest Slime Mag­net around the track.
ball mag­net play .. mak­ing a person
mag­nets and met­al pieces — baby
mag­nets and met­al pieces — see-saw
mag­nets and met­al pieces — elephant
mag­nets and met­al pieces — house
mag­nets and met­al pieces — person
mag­nets and met­al pieces — sit­ting down robot
mag­nets and met­al pieces — house
mag­nets and met­al pieces — flower design
mag­nets and met­al pieces — bridge
Fish­ing with paper­clips — how to make a paper­clip magnetic.