Google Classroom for Parent Communication

As I wrote in my previous post, I am in the early stages of learning to use Google Classroom. I am getting more and more comfortable with it and liking it more and more all the time. I feel like it really helps me tailor my program to individual students' needs, and also to have a much more accurate understanding of what those needs are; there is just so much feedback built into it.

Because of that I feel like it would be great to include parents into this loop. I am thinking of inviting them to use it to see what kinds of assignments I am giving to the students, as well as how their child is performing on each assignment. It would allow me to communicate so much more information to parents than I am otherwise able to do.

This week I wrote a letter that I am planning to send home to parents to explain this idea. I am including it here, in a generic form, in case it would be useful to other teachers to have something similar.

https://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/Google-Classroom-Letter-to-Parents-1758611

Using Google Forms, in Classroom, to do Class Surveys

This week I tried something new. I used Google Forms to make a questionnaire in French for the students about their favourite foods. Like this:

It was very easy to do. A good tutorial about how to use google forms is this one, by Scott Monahan:

I used google classroom to send the form to the students as an assignment. Here is a link to google classroom.

https://classroom.google.com/u/0/ineligible

Google classroom allows the teacher to track who has completed the assignment and who hasn't.
If your board doesn't support google classroom, you can still do this activity; just stay in google forms.

Google forms automatically compiles the data from the completed forms into a spreadsheet as students submit their responses.

You can also, (and this is my favourite) view the responses in graph form, by going back to the original form and opening the "responses" window, and clicking on "summary of responses".

Using these graphs, the students can discuss the outcomes of the survey (in my case in French).
It gives a lovely pictorial representation of our class preferences.

You could also use this for any kind of voting/ opinion surveys. You could also create a form that students could use to respond to oral presentations, and give feedback.

In my case, I'm just getting started with it, and wanted to try this simple survey as a bit of an experiment. The students were really engaged- much more than if I had given them a pencil-and -paper survey, and they enjoyed seeing the responses graphed at the end. I think it helped them feel like their voice had been heard, to see their response registered within the whole.

I will definitely do it again.

Slow Down for Art

I used to work as a Waldorf class teacher, before working in the public system. Waldorf education is deeply grounded in the arts. All the subject matter is taught through the arts in order to reach directly from the heart of the teacher to the hearts of the students.

As a public school teacher, I teach French to the older students and Arts to the younger ones- giving planning time to other teachers. 

Because the Waldorf students get so much practice in the Arts, they develop comfort exploring their creativity, and also, after time, they begin to develop their own creative voice. It takes time for this to happen, and lots of exposure to different media. In a Waldorf class, there is a period allotted each week for watercolour painting, and another for drawing, another for violin. Other arts are integrated into the "main lessons". And each year, each class in the school puts on a class play- a full-scale dramatic performance- related to the content they are studying.

In public schools, there is (usually) less class time devoted to art, and art is seen as separate from the rest of the curriculum. This creates a time pressure that makes it hard to "fit art in" and when a teacher can "fit it in", it's hard not to rush.

But creativity thrives when it isn't rushed. 

This is the lesson I am trying to bring to what I am doing now. I can't always control how much time is given to art in the day, or how much art becomes part of the "regular curriculum". But in the time I do have with the students for art, I am trying to slow down. I am trying to give myself permission to spend more than one class period working on the same song/ the same piece of art. Sometimes something just needs to take longer than a single period. It's okay to use an art period just for watercolour painting for many months. This is how a student can develop enough technique with the medium that they can start to use it to express their own ideas, in their own voice.

At first it is hard to do this- hard to ignore the temptation to rush through as many different forms/media as possible. But the more I do this, the more I am able to slow down the teaching of art, the deeper and richer the experience becomes. 

This is my favourite resource for teaching art to children.

http://artprojectsforkids.org/

A daily blog with over 200 watercolour projects, 150 drawing lessons, 80 craft projects, 70 collage projects and over 200 fine art projects- all for free.

The projects are very accessible, even if you have very little experience/ comfort teaching art. And the materials are simple and inexpensive- the kind of thing that even the most art-budget-restricted public school is likely to have.