Let us help you teach like a ninja!
Do you ever feel your classroom just keeps getting louder and louder until you want to take your ears off? As your students get more comfortable, the noise level can get out of hand. Of course, the activity going on in your room can often impact the noise, but your body language and your tone of voice play a bigger role than you may realize. This is a real experiment we tried on our students.
[Read more…] about How to Set the Noise Level in Your Classroom
As you know, YouTube is a wealth of resources for professional learning, both for fun and for learning how to fix your broken gas dryer (ninjas like to fix their own things, after all). Using YouTube in the classroom with your students is also a powerful tool (assuming you are allowed to)! Schools and districts that block YouTube are living in the wrong century! To us, it would be like banning a library (but that is a whole other issue and worthy of its own post).
[Read more…] about How to Leverage the Power of YouTube in Your Classroom
Are you looking for something quick, easy and fun to do in the gym or outside at recess? We’ve been searching for games that students can play that don’t require a lot of equipment and or are simple enough that students can play them on their own with adult support. Playground games are the answer!
Students love older playground games that seem new to them. Even something as basic as teaching students a new chant to use while skipping can boost engagement. Read more to learn how we use playground games to build relationships, get in some physical activity and have some fun!
[Read more…] about Why You Should Revive Old Playground Games
Our classroom chemistry unit is one of our favourites to teach because it allows for so many opportunities for students to explore and experiment. Sometimes, we let students explore on their own by posing questions to them. Other times, we demonstrate experiments. Either way, experiments take a bit of work to set up, do, and clean up. Don’t let that stop you. Here are some of our favourite chemistry experiments!
[Read more…] about How to Escalate Your Chemistry Experiments
Over the years we’ve attended hundreds of hours of professional development for teaching students to write. Our school has tried out resources from Ruth Guthrie and the 6+ Traits of Writing, Barbara Mariconda and Empowering Writers and even Lucy Calkins and her Writers’ Workshop model. None of these were perfect. Some students did well with some of the lessons and some students didn’t see a lot of growth in their writing. Some students learned to follow a formula but struggled with being creative. How do you include different types of writing in your daily writing?
[Read more…] about How to Include Different Types of Writing in Your Classroom
If you’ve ever shared a class or a classroom with another teacher, you might have called yourselves co-teachers or team teachers. What’s the difference between co-teaching and team teaching? We’ve discovered that most people use these terms interchangeably, but we’re going to challenge you to think about it in a different way. Do you like sharing a classroom with another teacher?
Sometimes team teachers are thrown together whether they planned it or not. Here are some ways to make the most of your team teaching situation.
[Read more…] about 7 Amazing Team Teaching Tips
