Collaboration and innovation create new classroom in Muskoka

Nipissing’s Muskoka campus has a cool new teaching lab designed to model a primary level classroom.

The staff, students and faculty collaborated to transform one of the existing classrooms into the teaching lab for education students. Similar to the Brantford campus’ Early Learning-Kindergarten classroom, the Muskoka lab classroom incorporates common primary classroom resources like a word wall, pocket charts, teaching resources, math manipulatives and more. The goal of the teaching lab is to create an authentic primary classroom which will model ideas for the students and allow students to take ownership over the design and maintenance of the educational space. 

Muskoka campus students will manage the updating of displays, requesting new resources and brainstorming innovative uses for the classroom to enhance their learning. 

“This classroom gives us the opportunity to control and manipulate our work environment, something that we may not have the opportunity to do on placement. It helps us feel comfortable in knowing what we will be responsible for when we graduate as we will already have experience updating our learning environment,” said Sadie Grasse, a second-year concurrent student.

Contributions were provided by the Schulich School of Education, Nipissing’s faculty, and Monsignor Michael O’Leary Catholic Elementary School in Bracebridge. In addition, the staff and students of the Muskoka campus have created many original resources including the word tree, which was painted on the wall by the students. The staff used velcro strips to attach fall leaves with a sample set of primary words. In the winter, the fall leaves will be replaced with new words on snowflakes, and in the spring those snowflakes will be replaced with leaves. 

This is just one example of how this collaborative effort has led to a great educational resource and space for the students of the Muskoka Concurrent Education Program.