Guest blogger Gaylene Racette-Markel

Teaching my Ranch class at Judge Bryant School

Judge Bryant School has been a wonderful experience; they have been really accepting of our Ranch classes.  We are still very new here and so we are developing relationships.  We do what we can to fit in and be a part of the school.  This includes supervising at recess, attending meetings and assemblies, our youth getting involved in extra-curricular activities such as sports, going on field trip, participating in track and field, and anything else that comes along.  It is really a case of both sides feeling each other out and getting to know each other.

Two Ranch Ehrlo classrooms at Judge Bryant provides variety

Ranch Ehrlo has two classrooms at Judge Bryant.  For me, this is most useful in terms of added support and flexibility.  We are able to team-teach, which helps to provide variety for the students and we can play to our strengths.  We each have different teaching styles and we get to use them to their best ability.  We take both classes for gym, each day together, which works out really well.  I enjoy teaching the socials and sciences in my class, where it can be group-based.

Student inquiry-based learning

In my classroom, I have made a shift to student inquiry-based learning.  All the students have different abilities in each subject – so to help include everybody I make sure it is a broad topic that interests everyone.  So, for example, we started initially with The Lightning Thief, which is a 2005 fantasy-adventure novel based on Greek mythology.  My students really got interested in Greek Gods and they started researching about them.  It was all student-directed and each went in a different direction to learn about the Greek Gods – the students made family trees, dioramas, and others wrote reports.  It becomes student inquiry-based learning where they can teach each other what they have learned.