Standard 7

Educators engage in professional learning.

Spring Fling Workshop, April 2019

Something I am very proud of is my bilingualism, and another is my willingness to be a life long learner. This means that any opportunity that arises for me to improve my knowledge, especially in the french language subject area, excites me, and when I was looking at professional development opportunities last spring, I came across this fantastic workshop:

In April, I attended the annual Spring Fling professional development day in School District 57. The topic of this workshop was: “La grammaire en 3D.” The workshop was delivered in french, and I was able to network with a large group of French Immersion educators. The workshop explored a system (created by Brigitte Ducas) to classify the Parts of Speech using geometric shapes, in order to improve students’ writing skills.

I loved the mixture between Language Arts and Numeracy, and the interactive nature of classifying the Parts of Speech in this system. This was also a particularly well-timed workshop, since I had just finished teaching a grammar unit in my English 8 class that March. Furthermore, the techniques explained in this workshop are totally transferable between French and English. I was thrilled to receive a package full of resources that can be employed throughout my future practice.This workshop was a great learning experience, was so much fun, and gave me a new and exciting way to teach grammar!