Author: Juno

The Zone’s of Regulation

October 31, 2025 / Juno / 0 Comments

The Zone’s of Regulation is a framework that was designed to help individuals with understanding and managing their emotions, behaviours and sensory needs. This framework shows that it supports neurodivergent and neurotypical learners, establishes better mind-body connection and awareness for those familiar with it, builds stronger connections with peers, and helps with learning enhancment and focus.

The Zone’s of Regulation break our emotions up into four categories….

The Green Zone – this is when an individual is feeling calm, happy, focused; “They have a calm energy and a sense of control”. When student’s are in this zone they will have an easier and more enjoyable time learning and engaging with classwork.

The Yellow Zone – this is when an individual is feeling silly, frustrated, worried; “Higher energy and stronger feelings”. This can very quickly escalate to the red zone or blue zone causing more distress for the individual. When student’s feel in the yellow zone they may start to get frustrated or tired of doing the class activity.

The Blue Zone – this is when an individual is feeling sad, tired, sick; “Low levels of enegry and down feelings”. When student’s are in this zone their may be a lack of engagement or interest in the activities. Their could also be a purposeful seperation created from the student to gain more space.

The Red Zone – this is when an individual is feeling scared, angry, out of control, or even overjoyed; “Extremely high energy and strongest feelings”. One thing to note about the red zone is that it doesn’t just depict anger but can represent extreme overjoyment that feels overwhelming. This zone is probably the hardest zone for a student to be experiencing while in a classroom trying to learn. The extreme feelings and energy makes it very hard to focus and often lead to emotional outbursts.

Weekly Reflection #2 – Pacific School of Innovation and Inquiry

October 12, 2025 / Juno / 0 Comments

“Education is not the filling of a pale, but rather the lighting of a flame”

Jeff Hopkins Pacific School of Innovation and Inquiry located in Greater Victoria is an independant high school that focuses on inquiry based learning rather than traditional learning found in most schools in Canada. The major difference between this school and a traditional high school is that students are given more autonomy in their education, and the school fosters an environment that allows for a variety of ways to learn. The structure of the school allows for student’s to research and learn about things that really interest them, while strengthening competencies such as critical and creative thinking. What I like about this school is that it gives students the opportunity to be excited about their education. PSII has a Detailed Daily Calendar that students get to look through and decide what subjects or classes they want to partake in. They offer a variety of classes to students ensuring that their is something for everyone. Some classes that stuck out to me were ASL, Electronic Music Production, Beginner Japanese, and Ceramics. On top of these more elective courses they also offer more traditional subjects like Pre Calculus 11 & Calculus 12, Physics and Chemistry. I think it is great that they offer a combination of traditional and elective classes to allow students who want to pursue university to have the background knowledge that they will need like Calculus 12. With that being said many of the elective classes that are offered are those that you would find in University or College level, offering specific and in depth subjects to deeper students interest and understanding of the topics. Jeff mentions in his video that a student created a paper on Ebola prior to the outbreak that happened in parts of Africa and it has been read by thousands of people to learn about the causes of an outbreak and how to mitigate it from happening. This is just one of the many incredible things that this school is doing, all because they are giving their students the freedom of choice for their own education.

The quote that is featured above is one that Jeff says at the beginning of his TedX video. I really resonated with this quote and I believe that it sums up this type of learning offered at PSII well. Some of the best learning or education I have had in my life has been done on my own time while researching topics of interest to me, not while writing an eight page paper on a historical event that didn’t quite captivate me. That’s not to say that learning about traditional topics and historical events aren’t important, they absolutely are. I believe it is important for humans to be well rounded and knowledgable on all topics. Where I think free inquiry is interesting and powerful is for example taking something like learning about New France. New France is a major part of Canadian History and it is important to know about the history of our country. However what if you had a student that learnt about New France but had an interest in Spanish History, you could say to them instead of writing a paper about New France, why don’t you compare and contrast the rise and fall of New France to New Spain, and try to find the commonalities or differences between these historical events. That slight change and freedom for inquiry could take a C paper to an A+ purely due to the increase of interest from the student. As educators are goal should always be to help our students suceed to the best of their abilities, not just in our class but as human beings. In order to allow our students to succeed it is our job to ignite that flame for learning.

October Resolution Check-in

October 12, 2025 / Juno / 0 Comments

We are coming up on the second week of October and so I thought it would be a good time to reflect on this months monthly resolutions. My resolutions for this month were time management, excercise and proper nutrition.

Succeses so far…

Excerice! I have completed 9 Lagree classes so far in the month of October so I seem to be on track for my goal of 20 classes. One thing I think that would benefit me is making sure I am stretching. My muscles feel pretty sore so I’d like to start doing 10 minutes of stretching in the morning and before bed. I will try to impliment this into my routine, starting with stretching on the days I plan to take a class and then maybe increase that to become apart of my daily routine.

Areas that need improvement…

Time Management… this one has been difficult as I find myself getting distracted with other things. I’m going to try using my Apple Calendar and specifically schedule in time for me to focus on school, cleaning, or my hobbies. I think it would also be good if I broke down my schedule for school into specific classes, that way I dedicate an hour to focus on just History and get ahead or just PHE, etc. I’m going to try implimenting this for the rest of the month and see if it helps with my goal of getting ahead of the work.

Proper Nutrition… this one is so important but I have been majorly lacking. I love cooking and making new things but have found myself being so exhausted by the time dinner comes around that I just order in or get something premade. I’m going to try using the Apple Calendar for the rest of the month to schedule cooking and meal prep times and see if that helps me stay on track a bit better.

Key Take Aways…

It will be important that I use the Apple Calendar to schedule things in but more important that I actually follow it. I think one thing I’ll have to keep in mind is not to overschedule as that will lead to a burn out if i’m over doing it. I’ll need to make sure I schedule enough time to enjoy my hobbies, relax, or spend time with my friends & family as that is so important for maintaining a healthy balanced lifestyle.

October Resolution

September 29, 2025 / Juno

September was a very busy month, being back at school and working more than I thought I would be. As the month comes to an end I am starting to feel a bit worn out, so I want to reflect on a few highlights that happened during the month of September. I got to see my bestfriend who lives in Calgary and spent a few days with her and our partners in Scottsdale, Arizona. School started and although it has been busy, it has been exciting finally taking teaching specific courses and not just general study year one classes. It also has been a highlight doing observations on Wednesdays at a local school, my mentor teacher is so lovely and the students are a blast! Another big highlight is that my friend had her baby! Even though she lives in another province it has been so sweet recieving photos of her newborn and seeing how well they are doing.

A few things that I felt I lacked this month were my time management, excerice and proper nutrition. With time management I found a tool that seems to work well for tracking assignments and due dates, however I would like to get ahead of the work instead of just making the deadlines. For excercise I am a passholder at Lagree and I really love going, but I found myself cancelling classes more often than not so didn’t get to go as much as I would have liked to. I have definitely fallen off my proper nutrition, because I have been so busy it has been hard to find time to cook at home and meal prep. This has caused me to eat out a lot and have a higher salt intake than I would like.

With these in mind my October Resolutions are going to be as follows…

Time Management: get AHEAD of the course work. When I have downtime read ahead, work on my blog, work on my sketchbook, start on assignments that aren’t due for another month. Try not to leave things to the week before but instead have it finished by the week before to lessen the amount of stress it causes leaving it last minute.
Excercise: go to Lagree 20 times in the month of October. This is a fun goal because for the month of October Lagree is having a fitness challenge where you win prizes after taking 5, 10 and 20 classes in the month! This will mean that I will have to take early classes before school to ensure I hit my goal, so getting to bed early is also very important!
Proper Nutrtion: meal prep and have ready to eat food available in the fridge. Because I find I live a very busy life it is hard to find the time to cook a full meal at home. Instead on a day off or an evening after school, meal prep for the week, have lunchs and dinners prepped and ready to grab to eliminate having to eat out so often when I’m in a rush to run out the door.

Monthly Resolutions

September 29, 2025 / Juno

You know how at the beginning of the year its common practice to write down your goals for the year, a list of your New Years resolutions? Well I like many people really struggle with maintaining these resolutions more than a month. The classic get a gym membership for a year go all of January and then forget that you even have it. These resolutions that are created at the beginning of the year are all usually important goals that improve things like mental health, physical wellness, financial literacy, or establishing a more balanced lifestyle. So why do we restrict creating habits or quitting habits and bettering ourselves to only one time a year? My proposed resolution to New Years resolutions is monthly resolutions! With this the idea is that at the end of the month you sit down like you would at the end of the year and reflect on the last month; when you felt your best, where you struggled, and how your going to achieve better wellness.

A common wellness habit tracking process is the 21/90 method which basically says it takes 21 days to form a new habit and 90 days to integrate it fully into your lifestyle. So with that in mind for the next 3 months I’m going to commit to creating monthly resolutions and track my progress as I go through the month. At the end of the 3 months I am going to see what habits stuck, what worked and what didn’t and see if monthly resolutions is something I will continue to incorporate into my life moving forward. To hold myself accountable I am going to do weekly blog posts of how my progress is going and share my personal experiences and insights of creating new habits.

Weekly Reflection #1 – Most Likely To Succeed

September 18, 2025 / Juno

For my first weekly reflection I wanted to do it on the film “Most Likely To Succeed”. I first want to summarize the key points from the film…

Larry Rosenstock is the founder of High Tech High. He created a school that was based off the belief that if a child is interested in something they will want to learn other things that may increase their ability or understanding of the thing they are interested in. An example he gives in the film is on how in his wood working class he noticed his students were willing to learn geometry as it helped them make more stable and functional furniture (00:17:10 Whiteley). He also has a strong understanding and belief that everyone learns in different ways, based off of his own experience studying for the law bar in an unconventional way. Larry established High Tech High with no bells, no written exams, classes aren’t divided into subjects and teachers are brought in on yearly contracts to teach what they are passionate about. This means that teachers have freedom to choose subjects and subject matter that goes beyond the standard curriculum that’s traditionally required. Within each class and the teachers chosen subject matter their is a high emphasis on soft skills such as time management, work ethic, collaboration, confidence building and learning how to deliver as well as recieve feedback. The improvement of these skills are essentially the core mission of the school, creating a group of learners that develop skills instead of retaining information.

What I found most interesting and relevent to today with High Tech High was the acknowledgment and awareness to how artificial intelligence is going to impact our future generations. They had a couple different reasonings for why soft skills are important but what I took from the film was that these human skills are hard to replicate with artificial intelligence. We already see many careers being taken over by AI but the careers that require human compassion, empathy, collaboration and compassion will be very hard to replace with anything other than a human that posseses those skills. The ability to retain information is not as valued as it was in the past due to the fact that we have an unlimited amount of resources and information at our fingertips. We have been learning in history how education has adapted and changed based off of the societal needs at the time, as future teachers we are in a really interesting time where education needs to be transformed in a way to set our future generations up for success, and High Tech High is a great example of this.

With this being said I do think that tradional course content does have a place in education. I believe that it’s imporatant students are educated on all subjects like social studies, math, sciences and the arts as I believe this can help create well rounded individuals. However I do believe that instead of trying to understand every single part of a subject and play a memory game just for a test, it would be more interesting to allow students to understand some main points of the content with the goal to then create a collaborative project based off of something they find interesting that’s either within or relative to the content. An idea I thought would be interesting is if you were teaching a high school math class, your class project could be to code an app which would require some basic understanding of mathematical equations. This could also be done with younger years through access to various different platforms that allow for app building. With this group project in mind it makes the content being learned much more interesting and engaging for the learners and they end up walking away with a tangible item that they worked months to build.

I believe their is space for both traditional and modern education to exist cohesively in our schools, but its important to recongnize the many ways that children learn. We already see many schools implimenting this but it may be time to veer away from traditional testing and lean more into the types of projects and ideas that will develop human skills talked about in the documentary.