Let us help you teach like a ninja!
Kindness is one of our core values in our school, classroom and lives. We try to find ways to encourage kindness every chance we get.
How do we encourage kindness all year? We weave it through our lessons and we build connections with our students. These connections build between students and we become a community. Through community, kindness becomes natural.
[Read more…] about How to Weave Kindness into the Classroom Every Day
Is it possible that your willingness to help your students might actually be hindering their growth? As teachers, we intend to help our students learn as much as possible as we are often measured by our students’ successes, but is our eagerness to help accidentally sabotaging our students? Do you teach helplessness?
We work with many different professionals as a classroom teacher. We deal with other teachers, interventionists, support staff such as Educational Assistants, speech-language supports and then outside systems such as social workers, occupational therapists and private medical professionals. The goal of all these people is to have students be successful.
But sometimes students need to struggle. When you take away the struggle, you might actually be preventing learning from happening. In fact, you might be reinforcing negative behaviours such as learned helplessness.
[Read more…] about How to Accidentally Teach Helplessness to Students
Have you been put in charge of school spirit days? Looking for ideas? Well, we surveyed everyone we could think of everywhere we could think of to come up with a list of possible theme days you could host at your school.
Dressing up can come with its challenges. It’s great fun for some, but it can also be stressful for others. No matter what the theme, we encourage you to always make it voluntary, fun and no judging (for best or anything else).
Keep in mind not all your students will have access to the things they would need in order to dress up so no one should ever be excluded. And, you DO NOT have to have a dress up day every week of school. It’s ok to keep it simple and just have the occasional day. That’s what makes it special.
And remember, some theme days work better for different age groups. As with any theme day, the day is supposed to be fun. If there is any chance there will be cultural inappropriateness, racism or insensitivity to others, the theme day is not right for your school.
[Read more…] about How to Build Community With Theme Days for School
If you are often tagging #teachertired on your social media posts, then maybe it’s time you stopped joking about it and did something to change. Being tired is part of life, but if you are so tired that you cry in your car on a daily basis, then it’s time to break some bad teacher-tired habits.
This is not about judgment. This comes from love-because we have been there. We have cried in the car. We’ve stress-eaten crappy food. Sometimes we’ve taken out our tiredness in our family relationships. We’ve felt guilty for not being a good enough teacher, not being a good enough spouse, not being a good enough parent and not being a good enough cook (no one said it was rational). We often used humour to joke about how tired we were, but the real problem was that we kept letting it continue.
[Read more…] about Teacher Tired Habits to Break
Whether you hate to teach art, love to teach art, or you’re somewhere in between, you’ve probably been in a position where you are obligated to provide artwork for a Christmas concert, winter concert or another winter event.
While December can be a very busy time, we do love the holidays. Our students are a mix of backgrounds, but the majority celebrate Christmas. In our classroom and school, we celebrate every holiday. We’re so inclusive that we literally celebrate every holiday. All students are welcome to participate as much as they like (or not at all). And while we call it a Christmas concert, it’s not always Christmas-themed.
[Read more…] about How to Make Christmas Art Projects to Give
December can be a great month. It can also be exhausting. Your schedule gets tossed aside for concert rehearsals, bad weather and overstimulation of the little darlings in your care. How do you teach when your whole schedule needs to be tossed? This is our guide to calm the chaos.
There are three whole weeks of learning that are supposed to happen in December, but it can be VERY challenging to fit it all in. Here is what we do to mitigate the chaos.
While December is the month with the most disruptions for us, these ideas can work any time of year.
[Read more…] about How to Calm the Chaos in December
