Paper Mache Goodness

Coming up with creative teaching ideas is always a trick. Social Studies can be dry and boring, or a little more fun, and of course I'm all for the fun side of life! Whenever I'm planning my lessons I try to work from a list of activity ideas that I can apply to various topics, but last week when I came across the topic of rock layers in the textbook, I was stumped; how was I gonna make igneous, metamorphic, and sedimentary rocks relevant to grade 10s without putting them to sleep? Then I realized that they'd probably NEVER experienced the glorious wonders of paper mache in their past traditional Chinese schooling and decided to see if it would work with them.

And work it did! The assignment was, in groups of 4, to build and paint a paper mache model of the topography of Western Canada (using the digram in the textbook) and to label all the rock layers down the side, plus the mountain regions, ocean, and lakes. For 3 days they worked away and had a total blast!


Here you can see Beryl (in the pink shirt... easy name to remember for us b/c her body is kinda shaped like a barrel), holding up a lumpy mess which are really Canadian mountains! It looked a lot better after it was painted! The kids got SO dirty... they didn't all listen when I recommended they bring aprons. O well.

And here we have Jack who won one of the student awards for February. At the end of each month all the teachers vote for one student from each class who has worked really hard, gotten good results, spoken English a lot, helped others, etc and present them with this award. Then we take a picture by the BC flag and post the picture in the hallway. It's a really big deal for the kids to win one of these and it's always tough to decide who to vote for. Jack totally deserved it more than anyone else this month though- he's a real joy to teach!

This weekend we're heading out with a bunch of friends, which will be great. Also, Andrew is trying to start up a band again and meeting with lots of other expat guys to play guitar, so he's happy doing that.

K, gotta get back to work... hope you all have a good weekend!