The Our Kids #OKschoolMem blog hop started in September and the Canada-Wide Private School Expos is on and it's almost time for the expo to start right here in Vancouver!
There are not too many things more important than our children's education and the impact that their teachers can have on them. I want to share a memory about my daughter Sian and the positive impact one of her teachers has had on her.
It was Sian's grade two teachers, she had more than one as these ladies did a job share for the position and had been doing it for several years. Sian is in French immersion which I think it's wonderful as I'm a big believer in the benefits of having a second language. Sian in grade two much like she is now was an outgoing child, loved to chat, play-act and was very sociable, sometimes maybe too sociable :). Teachers in the past would comment on how often times Sian was very distracted and that they were worried that perhaps French immersion was too much for her. This of course had me worried but knowing Sian as only a mom can sometimes I knew that she was more than capable but you had to get her attention and you had to understand her thought process.
What I loved about these two teachers were that they "got" Sian, they knew she was an intelligent and sociable little girl and that they had to capture her attention as they put it. So what they would do was use more visuals so that Sian who would be distracted if other children were talking or doing something else as she wanted to see everything that was gong on in the class. Which of course made things challenging for her to hear and see what was being taught when she was trying to take in everything in the class. The teachers were so creative, they did things like using puppets to help them teach the lessons, or getting the children up to the front and get them to use the puppet to explain what was going on. For a child like Sian this was beyond entertaining and of course she always wanted to be one of the first to go to the front of the class and "teach" the other children with the puppets. One of the teachers even told me that Sian did a wonderful impersonation of that teacher. Oh my I laughed at that one and then thought to ask well I hope Sian was nice when she was impersonating you 🙂
Not only did being more creative and incorporating more visuals that captured Sian's attention it of course pretty much got the attention of the entire grade two class so it benefited all of them. To this day I still appreciate that these teachers were so thoughtful to incorporate a teaching aid with the intent that if it even just helped the one child that it was worth it. I call that dedicated and even now Sian who is now in grade 6 she still says those two ladies are her favourite teachers and when she can she stops by their classroom to say hello. Now that's a wonderful school memory in my opinion for both Sian and myself as a parent.
Here's some good news as mentioned the Canada-Wide Private School Expo has been going on since September and now it's Vancouver's turn! It will be here on November 11. Here's some more information for you, hope you'll stop on by!
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Kid's know...my daughter started 3rd grade in a new school, and was doing very poorly. The only news I would get from her teacher was bad. I tried everything I could think of, but she was very unhappy. One day she came home from school and came to me crying and knelt down at my feet. Between sobs she begged me to get her out of her class. She told me that from her first day at the new school her classmates had been teasing her and eventually bullying her about being new, and her weird southern accent. When I asked her what the teacher did, and that 9 yr.old said that that was the problem, the teacher laughed too. She said that she was sure that the other 3rd. grade teacher would never let her students act that way. The next day I went to see the principal and for the first time in 20+ yr. he changed a students class. Needless to say, the rest of the year went by smoothly, they even put her into the "Talented and Gifted" afterschool program. I do think that children really are aware of the way a teacher feels about them and whether or not they can feel safe.