Teaching Teaching Teaching

Well hello! My name is Beth and I am a teacher. For the first 6 years of my teaching career I taught Grade 7 and 8 mainly Language Art, Geography and History. There was also a sprinkling of French, Health, Drama, Dance, Art and Science. This past September I made a major change- I switched schools, I moved from Grade 8 to Grade 4 and I taught Math for the first time in my career!

Wow...I can't believe that according to my stats people have already been here to visit! Crazy! I was so not ready for that.


Anyway, I have decided to start a blog about teaching because I have embarked on such a new experience in my career. I only taught Grade 4 for the first 4 months of the year because in January I had a beautiful baby girl.

I really enjoyed the change in grade levels and am already excited to go back and try some new things. I am starting an Additional Qualifications course on Monday to become qualified to teach the primary grades as well and I thought a blog would be a great way to document my professional progress and any good idea that pop up along the way. I enjoy reading many other teaching blogs and I figured it was my turn to give back. I am going to try to update this blog once a week to start as I don't want to overwhelm myself, I mean after all, I am still on mat leave and have a baby to take care of!

To start off right I wanted to share something that I use often in my classroom.

Please head over HERE to see the assessment posters. 

This link will take you to a document I made with the help of the Ontario Curriculum Language Arts Expectations.  The Level 1-4 descriptors come right from the assessment chart in the Ontario curriculum so if you do not teach in Ontario you are going to want to adapt those. The Level 1-4 posters are ones I originally made when I taught Grade 7 because I found the common "ice cream cone" analogy was too young for my intermediate students and that using basketball terms really helped them to understand what the actual levels on their assignments and reports meant. Feel free to use these if they will help you!