Field Day 1, Strike Day 1

To begin, this is a great interview to listen to for a bit of an overview of what has lead to the 2025 Alberta Teachers strike.

October 5th was World Teacher's Day , and if you haven't seen any of the photos or coverage of the rallies at the Alberta Legislature Building in Edmonton or in Calgary yesterday, please do check them out. I found them super encouraging.

As for today, my youngest is at his Kinder Academy (private) at the daycare, (we pay for it because of course Alberta only has one year of part-time daycare in the public system, which he will be missing tomorrow). My older two are at home, working on a morning of writing, math, hockey and arts before giving Adventure Academy a try (thank you for first months free). This afternoon I have a Minecraft reading activity planned and I borrowed a LEGO Mindstorms robotics kit from the library for them to do a great STEM activity this week.

The Learning Plan for parents, provided by the Alberta Government, suggests Grade 4 education for today to be:

• A 3 and a half minute 'Inside the Actors' video from the Kahn Academy on how to read and respond to stage directions in a script.

• A 4 minute video (also Kahn Academy) on supporting the main idea of a piece of writing with key details, mainly breaking down one specific example of a paragraph about Lucretia Mott.

• A 6:47 min video introducing place value from Virtural Nerd.

• Another Khan Academy video, 5 and a half minutes on communicating decimal values in words.

• A handful of randomly generated practice questions from IXL, 4 practice questions from Khan Academy and 20 from K5 learning (second page).

• The fur trade unit from TVO that feels like it could be a full week long (or longer unit), but also seems like a great resource (thanks Ontario Government, I've bookmarked this website and will be back).

• A draw or craft a traffic light while taking about taking a breath and thinking about how to solve your problem activity from School Mental Health Ontario.

• A 5 minute TED talk on making smart decisions.

• The what is science preview video (5 ish min) and materials from Generation Genius, which invites you to make a free account that expires after 30 days (after that $405 a year).

In review of Day 1, it would appear that language arts isn't much of a priority, as its reduced to 7ish minutes of video watching. Math, well a little bit of specific practice on place value and some work pages from K-5 Learning, which is a handy website with a pretty significant amount of freely available pdf work sheets (if you want more, its $25 USD per year for the full content, I've used it in the past with my kids). Khan Academy, this is my first time taking a look at it, I've heard ok things about it, but haven't put any time into using it with my own kids, and so I'll withhold judgement until I do. There is more than a days work of social studies assigned to say the least and hopefully no one in our provincial government will be profiting from subscriptions to Generation Genuis. (Oh there's a grant apparently available to families that choose to pull their students from public schooling into a private school that monitors/directs home schooling...which I guess is one way of getting class sizes down, but you can't use it for this website).

The TVO website looks amazing, and I have a notion to use the Fur Trader resource linked for my LT1 for my Field 440 course. More time to be spent there later. By the way, Ontario funds education per student at just about the national average and well above Alberta, and it looks like the Alberta Government is leaning pretty heavily on some of that funding in the learning plan they've provided for parents. The TVO Learn website is primary funded by the Ontario Ministry of Education as is School Mental Health. TVO appears 153 in the two week K-12 learning plan.

As for the rest of my field day one, I am off to reflect on my day, record my observations and pose and answer questions in the class discussion. We're meant to be focusing on orientation to the school and jurisdiction today, and take note of the school's culture. So I guess I will review their student handbook and social media postings.