What lessons inspire you?

Students know when their teachers are engaged.

Students know when their teachers are passionate about what they are teaching. This passion–your passion–is a crucial ingredient in engaging students.

Here’s what I’m wondering about today:

What lesson do you love doing with your students?  What lesson ignites your passion for teaching?

Action: Take 5 minutes to leave a comment below.  Describe in a few sentences one of your inspiring lessons!

Share your passion and inspiration with others who, like you, love teaching.

 

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11 thoughts on “What lessons inspire you?

  1. What inspires me? To see students making connections between themselves and the real world. Getting them to perhaps imagine that they are back in ancient times with many discoverers of knowledge and information. E.g. letting students know about the lives of people who made discoveries and then letting students imagine that they had a chance to work with a famous person. What might they then make a discovery about? I remember a student making a connection between themselves and Pythagoras and then writing in their journal “When I was walking with my friend Pythagoras….” and then later “I think I have discovered something that Pythagoras didn’t….” I knew then that the student had made a connection.

    1. Love to hear your classroom is full of ghosts of mathematicians past Pam! Thanks for sharing 🙂

  2. Love doing perspective drawing where we all sit in a circle and draw another student who models for us. With grade threes and fours you’d think you’d get a lot of “I can’t do it!” “it’s too hard!” But once they see you furiously scribbling away, and then see how high the bar is set, they instinctively just shut up, focus, and try to match it. If you pour your all into drawing, then they do too. It might not feel like a traditional lesson in any sense, but the results are always astounding. They blow me away every time.

    1. I can only imagine how excited the students must get to see their teacher fully INTO the activity. Would love to be a fly on the wall!

  3. Let’s face it, dinosaurs are always a hit with Kindergarten students. At their peak of existence, they had ample food to eat, plants and meat alike. Dinosaurs were not invincible as some children may perceive them to be due to their sheer size and physical capability. In fact, they were vulnerable to hunger, predators, climate change, evolutionary setbacks, volcanic eruptions, and each other! I’m inspired by drawing students to the binary opposites of powerful and weak that emerge in this grand topic. We role-play a time when dinosaurs were strong and powerful, roaming the land freely practicing our roars and then we slow down our gait and enact a more vulnerable time when dinosaurs were hungry, thirsty and had little energy.

  4. “Mrs. S, are you sure you’re not a pioneer?” I love this questions!! This unit opens so many doors of opportunity for us to step back in history and recreate what it must have been like to live life as a pioneer. Last week we made butter. As the students passed jars filled with ice cold cream, shaking them with vigour, hearing the sloshing of the liquid and feeling the ‘clunk’ as the buttermilk separated from the solids, you could see the wonder in their eyes. Engagement? You bet. Spreading the butter onto fresh buns (thanks, mom!) and enjoying a meal together as we talked about the experience? Memorable…

  5. Too many things to choose! One thing that inspires me is drawing upon the somatic in/for/of learning. What I mean by “drawing upon the somatic” is to bring to the fore students’ bodies and senses to explore a “new” concept or to offer a way to “own” the learning. Simple example: how do you spell onomatopoeia? It’s a crazy word, and a bit daunting but manageable if you chant and clap it out: break it down into sets of three letters for visual ease (“ono”/ “mat”/ “opo”/ “eia”), chant the letters LOUDLY whilst clapping LOUDLY each time you say a letter–do this several times and students will always remember how to spell the word. Really.

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