Submitted by: ERGO Members

The goal for this series of blog posts is to make a collection of quick and easy activities that can be shared to increase understanding, support students, build system capacity, and/or inspire growth and movement.

Google Earth Journeys

The student(s) takes the class or teacher on a tour of their homeland or take them on a journey. Explore their old school, neighbourhood, playground, surroundings or favourite places. 

Connections 

This supports knowing your learner and culturally responsive and relevant practices.

To dig more deeply into this, consider reading The K-12 Capacity Building

 Series monograph entitled "Culturally Responsive Pedagogy: Towards Equity and Inclusivity in Ontario Schools."

Action/Implementation Plan

As part of the intial conversation when getting to know our student(s) and learning about where they have come from, we have the newcomer student take us  on a tour of their previous home, school, neighbourhood. This allows the student to be the expert and to use L1, prior knowledge and personal experience to share their journey story. This exercise can be started as an oral conversation, using guiding questions and letting the students take the lead on what is shared. A follow up can be to rehearse and use the conversation as part of a writing task to share the student's journey story through voice to text or handwriting, whichever mode the student is most comfortable with.