Historical Thinking: Last month I attended the Historical Thinking Winter Institute at the Royal BC Museum in Victoria. The institute was designed for history / social studies educators and museum curators to look at historical thinking and how we teach about the past. The Royal BC Mu
During the municipal elections, many first heard about the SOGI 123 implementation as a topic for school board trustee candidates. Did they support SOGI? Were they against it? Those outside of the K-12 education system may not know what SOGI means, and its importance to kids and our c
Teaching Geography 12 A new school year has started! This year I have moved out of English Language teaching to focus on English and Social Studies subjects. This has also put me in the position of teaching Geography for the first time. Geography can be a dry subject. It also involves
Debating the Pipeline: On the west coast, the Kinder Morgan – Trans Mountain pipeline project has been a growing controversy for several years. Yesterday, the Canadian government announced its intention to buy the troubled project, and start construction this summer. Personally,
Indigenous Perspectives Over the past two years the Province of British Columbia has started to implement a new curriculum for students in Kindergarten to Grade 9. Over the next two years the new curriculum will be implemented for students in high school. This overhaul represents chan
Orcas imitate human speech Researchers from institutions in Germany, UK, Spain and Chile published a paper last month on their experiences with an orca whale named Wilkie. Wilkie has been trained to mimic human sounds. Wilkie was exposed to six human sounds including “hello̶
Innovations in Lesson Planning Universal Design for Learning (UDL) is a way for teachers to design lessons that encourage critical thinking and support a diverse classroom environment. The New BC Curriculum In the province of British Columbia, the curriculum is changing. The “ne
Throwback Post Three years ago I was living on the Gold Coast of Australia and reflecting on the differences between life in Canada and life there. Despite Canada and Australia sharing similarities, the differences in language were an area that I noticed the most. Using Australian sla
Learning a New Language… Again When I was in high school and university, I studied Spanish. During my second year, I mixed up courses and didn’t have the right credits to continue with Spanish, and didn’t need more language credits to graduate, so I stopped. One of m
Teaching Idioms, Learning Slang Teaching idioms (a group of words established by usage as having a meaning not deducible from those of the individual words (e.g., raining cats and dogs, see the light ) (from Google) is one of the more difficult lessons to teach in English language tea
