Strengthening Our Core

As someone who was buried alive in a rockslide on a grade six field trip (true story!) I can well imagine and appreciate the sense of being crushed under a mountain that Core French Teachers must feel when they face their stack of IEPs. For those with limited special ed background attempting to climb up (or dig out of) that mountain must seem like an insurmountable challenge. In order for Paul and I to fill in our life-saving one-page special ed profiles for each class ( you can find our template here ), we had to read a lot of IEPs. We noticed that we were flipping to five key spots to find the information that impacts an FSL teacher. To help out other mountain climbers, we created a " 5 Step IEP Reading for Core French Teachers " sheet to add to our Strengthening Our Core Toolkit. Things I'm Grateful For I’m grateful that our Board moved to Google so collaborating and sharing with colleagues is so easy! Things I'm Wondering About I wonder how other SERT and...

Wouldn’t it be great if we could all have the same starting point every day? As a Core French Teacher I am collaborating and working with my colleagues every single day. It makes sense as we teach the same children, and it is always a good way to reflect on my day and make the next day better.  The one teacher I wasn’t collaborating enough with was the SERT, which didn’t make much sense since we share all the neediest kids in the school. When Lisa came to me with the idea of supporting Core French with support from SERT, we did some digging. There are current documents about supporting children in second language learning but we found no evidence of teams putting this into practice at the school level. One of my frustrations has always been the minimal input the Core French Teacher has in the IEP writing process, other than the modified French pages, especially when the IEPs are printed out and my mailbox is full from top to bottom with every IEP in the school. There had to t...