Normandeau School
- Cydney Winter
- Dec 6, 2016
- 2 min read
The Normandeau school is a kindergarten to grade 8 school and they have established a program called Smart Fridays which are held every Friday of the month. SMART Fridays is a way to develop the kids smarts and to develop their learning skills. The students are categorized into green, yellow and red groups depending on their skill level. Green means they are capable of learning on their own, yellow means they need some assistance and red is for those who need one on one assistance. The other half of the day is for activities such as: swimming, archery and hockey to develop people skills and get to know all the teachers in the school. Unfortunately, I was not able to see this in progress because in December they make Christmas cards for their neighbouring community.
During this observation, I was looking more at the classroom layouts and I found the designs to be very practical. Many rooms had areas for the students to read or do work such as Xtramath to practice basic math skills on the computer while sitting on a bean bag chair. The set up was both teacher and student friendly. The desks were placed so everyone could see the board and the teacher could still make their way around the whole classroom. Some were in: single desks on their own, U shaped, groups and rows. In the younger classes, there were tennis balls on the bottom of the desks and chairs to prevent scuffs on the ground and rubber bands on the legs of the desk for fidgety students. In the older classrooms, there were a few chairs with rockers for students who couldn’t sit still. There were tons of visuals around the classroom and hallways, always something to see and many different craft. What I found the most interesting and meaningful was each class had a stash of snacks for students who were constantly hungry and didn’t have a packed lunch. One teacher told me the students who didn’t have a great home life would be given a bag of food to take home for the family at the end of each week.
Overall there were lots of bright and colourful walls and well designed classroom. The great thing about classrooms is I can always change things up and see what works for my class. I wish I could have experienced the SMART Fridays to see what it was all about but there’s always next time.
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