"A Love Letter to Canada" - Amazing Race & Grade 4 Curriculum

One of the great benefits of my role as an Instructional Coach is variety. A particularly busy and enriching day might include...

• starting my morning in a Grade 7/8 class teaching figurative language in literacy,
• meeting with the Principal about math data,
• transition to a Grade 3 class to enhance multiplicative thinking through relational rods,
• chatting with a Grade 6 teacher about a new technology option,
• finishing in a Grade 4 class supporting a cross-curricular approach to Social Studies.

Not only is this energizing and exciting, it's a powerfully effective way to learn the nuances of the curriculum across the grades. A fun challenge I have set for myself is to try to "Hit for the Cycle", a term borrowed from baseball which occurs when a batter hits a single, double, triple and a home-run in a single game. For me, that would be a visit with a Kindergarten, Primary (Gr. 1-3), Junior (Gr. 4-6) & Intermediate (Gr. 7/8) class in one day. So far, I have come close (ticking 3 of 4 boxes) on a few occasions. 

An additional perk about visiting multiple classroom is the opportunity to revisit curriculum expectations from grades that I have previously taught. This year, I was excited to pitch a unit from my time teaching Grade 4 in 2013. Through consultation with 4 teachers at 3 different schools, I was able to retool an engaging unit and infuse it with current teaching practice, including the use of Google Suite and other recently released tech-infused pedagogical tools.

The unit is built around Season 1 of The Amazing Race Canada.  Over the next three posts, I would like to provide a richer context for how this unit works so powerfully in a Grade 4 Canadian classroom.

The Genesis

When I first decided to try this unit, I was teaching at Eagle Heights Public School. This was a school in a phase of swift transition. The population was growing rapidly and the demographics were in flux. In 2013, the construction for the second building expansion project in 5 years was well underway. Additionally, the average number of new Canadians who were English Language Learners had quadrupled since my arrival in 2011.

I had watched The Amazing Race Canada season during the summer and knew it had a place in my classroom. My goal was to meet expectations of the Grade 4 Ontario Curriculum for Social Studies - Political & Physical Regions of Canada, but I also wanted to shake off the doldrums of typical practice (of which I had been guilty)...

• map colouring - 1 for provinces, 1 for physical regions, "My Western Cordilleras are blue."
• student presentations - "Our province is Saskatchewan..."
• those bad 1990's videos on YouTube (even well-meaning videos like this had run their course.)
• or worst of all, Canadian Province worksheets ... especially meaningless word searches.

I guess I most wanted to introduce my students (especially those who had just made Canada their new home) to the beauty of this magnificent country. I wanted them to make connections from places on the map to real places that the teams visited. I wanted them to learn about all of the incredible diversity in landscape, recreation, tradition and history that we have captured between three great oceans. Recently, Season 1 participant Dave Schram put it well when he shared the following...

When we were selected, the producers told all of us that... they "wanted the show to be a love letter to Canada."

That was really what I was after - a way for my students to fall in love with Canada.

• To know the immigrant experience at Pier 21 in Nova Scotia.
• To realize Robert Service wrote wonderfully fun & funny poetry about the Yukon.
• That Innuk throat sing, participate in Arctic Olympics and that Muktuk (whale blubber) contains Vitamin D they can't always get from the sun.
• To know that Ogopogo, the Saskatchewan Roughriders & "Body Break" are things that exist, and that some Canadians cherish them fondly.
• And so much more...

Not surprisingly, the unit was a hit. This was at a time before our board had embraced the Google Suite tools, so a lot of our work was on paper and displayed on the classroom walls. We dipped into multiple curriculum strands as we...

• tracked the progress of the race across a large map, calculating & rounding distances,
• documented arrival positions & eliminations for each leg,
• connected race challenges & events to the 6 Learning Skills outlined in the Ontario Growing Success Document,
• wrote about our favourite participants, locations and challenges,
• looked at the positive messaging implied in the shows use of Chevrolet, Air Canada, Interac & Cadbury chocolate,
• tried muktuk, Arctic char & muskox meatballs delivered from Steve (who lives in Iqaluit), 
• even got a surprise visit from Jet Black (a final four participant)
  

The next year, I worked with a Grade level partner and two classes were involved. We built on the successes and added activities. In 2015, I left Grade 4 for a new assignment and my former teaching partner continued running the program on her own. We were fortunate to have annual surprise visits from London participants Jet & Dave...who learned that the response to their arrival was sometimes overwhelming.

I presented the unit at several Elementary Teacher Federation Workshops and remain pleasantly surprised when I see evidence of it on the walls of an unfamiliar school. I'll admit, at this point, I was content with the project I had built and felt that it had legs for quite a few years. However, this year, I got a chance to upgrade the unit to match both the advances in technology and our Board's move toward Global Competencies. 

That, and more, in Part Two.