Kelly Hogan

This year I welcomed a new student into my third grade EAL class who transferred from a European school system.  This student is new to both the country and the English language, and is working hard everyday to adjust.  I was surprised to note on the first day of school that this student had been primarily taught cursive writing in their previous school as opposed to printing, which is more typical for lower elementary in the North American system.  My new student struggles to write in print when copying from the whiteboard, however, has neat and proper penmanship in cursive.  My other students are fascinated by this ‘fancy’ writing, and they immediately all wanted to learn how to write their names in cursive.      As a child in Canada, I was taught cursive, however, cursive writing has not been part of our mandated curriculum for years in North America.  Out of curiosity, I brought the topic up with my American colleagues, who are in the sam...

  ‘Scaffolding up the curriculum, rather than watering it down, is key for English learners’. This quote from WIDA at UW really resonated with me.  After over a full week of administering WIDA tests, and getting to know the new EAL students at my school, my thoughts keep returning to the same questions. How can I best support these students? How can I encourage pride in my multilingual learners? Most importantly, how can I be sure that they are receiving the full curriculum, and not only a ‘watered down’ version? The following article by Jon Nordmeyer, Tim Boals, Rita MacDonald and Rusland Westerlund gave some interesting insight to my questions:  https://www.ascd.org/el/articles/what-does-equity-really-mean-for-multilingual-learners

During my studies in education, and then again later at the interviews for my current teaching position, and countless times since, I have been asked to state my philosophy of teaching.  As all educators know, this is a question that will come up over and over again during our careers.  Prior to answering this question, I consistently feel compelled to explain my personal belief in the importance of change, flexibility, and being a life-long learner.  To make a single statement to answer this question just does not feel possible, and it would imply that my current pedagogical beliefs are permanent and will not change, and that is simply not the reality of the matter.  As I evolve in my profession, and continue to learn both through studies and my students, I will continue to embrace change in the field of education and will welcome new methods; therefore my practice is constantly evolving.  However, there are certain beliefs that I hold morally, ethically and pr...

I know most people make New Year’s resolutions or set goals on January 1st, but if you’re a teacher, the new year REALLY starts on the first day of school.   As I prepare to head back to the classroom next week, I’m taking note of my personal goals for the upcoming school year.   I have some small tweaks in mind for lessons that didn’t work as well as hoped last year, but overall there are three areas I would like to focus on this year. In no particular order, they are: Experiment more with Arts Integration Personally, I have always been interested in arts and design.   My first post secondary studies were in fine arts and art history, and even now my husband owns a contemporary art gallery and does community art projects in collaboration with the local government.   Art is, and will always be, very much a part of my personal life and I would love to utilize my expertise in this area to support my work in the classroom.   As mentioned in previous posts, I am cur...

During Covid a lot of things changed overnight for teachers.  We were thrust into the world of online teaching whether we wanted to be there or not.  As I mentioned in a previous post, I'm not a natural techie, so this sudden reliance on technology to do my job was huge learning curve.  I learned A LOT in the past couple of years about incorporating tech into my lessons and there a couple of tools that have definitely found a permanent place in my post-Covid classroom.   I use YouTube a lot in my classroom.  I love to start lessons with a short 3-5 minute video hook/song, I use longer clips to help with building background knowledge; and I use videos for classroom meditation, or brain breaks.  Naturally there are times when I need to share these videos via Google Classroom for homework/home support work, but there are other times when my students just really love a song or video and request that I share the link in our Google Classroom.  However,...

The last couple of years were stressful. There’s no way to sugar-coat it, Covid threw us all for a loop. Teachers were stressed, school Administrators were overwhelmed, parents were stretched-thin working full-time with children at home, and our students were forced to adapt to a new way of learning at a rapid pace.   Kids were feeling all the feelings! I have always felt that social/emotional learning (SEL) was a top priority, however it became really apparent throughout the Covid crunch that we as educators needed to make time and space in our lessons for SELs.   In 2020 I started to research new ways that I could add SELs into my elementary classroom on a daily basis.   I wanted to be sure that I was teaching my students how to recognize, name, and then manage their own emotions.   During Covid, while asking my students for what felt like the millionth time, “How are you doing with all this?”, I started to wonder if they even had the emotional vocabulary/awar...