Connections Matter

In August last year, before school began, I sent out a letter to all of my incoming grade 8 students. I wanted to set up the importance of connections before they even set foot in my classroom. We did Morning Circle every day, we talked about intentionally creating a community, we shared smiles and frowns.

I've always tried to make my classroom a strong community, and this is the first year that I made such an explicit effort to let my students know what my intentions were. I don't know why I hadn't been this explicit before, and I will absolutely continue to include students in my thought-processes, and in helping to build our community together.

To bookend the year, I wrote a letter to my students to include in their report card envelopes on the last day of school. I am not the first teacher to have this idea of course! I drew inspiration from many other teachers on Twitter, and ultimately I am very pleased with the list of life lessons I wrote up for my students.

Here is what I wrote. If it can be of use to anyone else, I'm happy to share :

Connections matter. In person, in writing, always.

Art Gallery 2019

Over the past few years of teaching Visual Arts to grade 8 students, we have experimented with many ways of getting them to apply what they have been learning in the creation of their own independent works of art. This year was no exception. However, this year, we made sure to schedule our year-end project so that we had a full hour at the end to create a gallery with all of their work.


For 5 hour-long classes, they created. Some took their work home to finish up.

Today, we turned the cafeteria into an art gallery, and everyone displayed their work.

It was stunning.

Students created paintings, sculptures, mixed-media, digital reproductions... and every piece of art was displayed proudly.

Some groups of students chose to recreate art in Minecraft.

Although all of the artwork was amazing, two pieces of art stood out to me in particular.

The first is this mixed media painting of a sea turtle with plastic straws

The second is this split face portrait. The description provided below by the artists is so poignant.

Women and a man are the same and could do the same thing.

I am so impressed with all of the work these artists have done on their final projects!