The new Manitoba E.L.A. curriculum is rolling into our classroom Fall 2017! I have been able to attend a number of PD sessions regarding it and am starting to have a good handle on it. The thing I love most about it though, is it's size. I have dreamed about having my students actually understand the curriculum since I started teaching. It was the mere size of the last one that kept me away.
So I started to tackle the project of turning our new curriculum into simple language/visuals that I can post in my room for my kids to see.
I reworded this document from Sense Making to Make Sense. Just makes more sense that way you know? I think this will be simple for students to understand and then their job will be to tell how they do each of these things.
We have started using John Spencer's LAUNCH cycle in our school. I really like how simple it is for kids to grasp. After studying the Explore & Design piece I realized that it fits the Elements of the Curriculum perfectly. Plus the posters look awesome! You will notice I have added the reflection questions in all the areas. I think these are the most important part of the new curriculum for kids to answer.
Power & Agency is the new part to this curriculum. I am very excited about how it changes what I chose to teach my kids. I have wanted to bring more of a human rights focus to my classroom for a long time, but always felt I was stepping on Social Studies' toes. Now I feel totally empowered to go for it! This image was definitely the most complex to design and I made many versions with lots of feedback from others.
All of these are still a work in progress but I think I am well on my ways to allowing students better access to curricular documents.
Oh by the way... if you haven't noticed already, I left one of the areas out. To me Language as a System has no element to it that is not already found within the other three areas. It feels like a political document to prove that we still care about grammar and spelling. Feel free to challenge me on that though.
Now I have to figure out how to put all these things onto a bulletin board.
Finally, surrounding the curriculum I will put the 6 C's (Critical Thinker, Collaborator, Creative, Communicator, Citizen, Character). I want my students to see these C's as part of their learning at all times. Oh... and you'll notice the kid in this image is the same as the one above!
