My First Blog Post

Here we go! My first ever blog post. I admit I set up a blog page a few years ago but failed to follow through. It is intimidating to write anything after following favourite bloggers such as Teacher Tom. Ah well, learning is all about taking risks right? So here goes a new learning experience for me, writing for others via a blog.

For my first posting, I want to share a first teaching experience. I have been teaching for more than 20 years now (and am amazed at how quickly those years have added up) but this was a pivotal moment, an important learning experience that has served as a good reminder when teaching young children.
 
Learning to manage a class of 30 children was new to me and the computer that someone had loaned our classroom provided a great way to occupy students and create some quiet moments in a busy room. The program, it's name long forgotten, was an ideal program to prepare students who had little rural experience for a class trip to a farm.  It had these cute little pigs on the screen, and I had thought, they looked more realistic than cartoonish.

To the farm and straight into the barn we went. The guide began by asking the children to name each animal she pointed to before we did anything else. She pointed to the horses, and the children identified the horses, she pointed to the cows and the children knew they were called cows. After naming typical farm animals she pointed to the last of the animals and .... silence.

30 students and not one knew what the animals in the pen were called! How could that be? We had read stories teaching us about farm animals, talked about what the animals ate and what their babies were called, and we even had a computer program that was filled with facts about them. I was stunned. Why didn't my students know what these animals were? The reason was simple. They weren't cute. They didn't say oink, oink as they did in the stories. They certainly weren't pink, and they were HUGE. This was a pivotal moment for me. My very own concrete learning experience. My students didn't know they were pigs because my students had no experience with these big, smelly creatures and they certainly didn't match up with any concept of a 'pig' presented in the classroom. Telling and seeing isn't enough if you don't have the experience to build on.

This year, my goal is to commit to more hands on learning experiences, and yes, even a few more classroom experiences a la 'Teacher Tom'.