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How to Calm the Chaos in December

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Don't allow the festive season to cause chaos in your classroom. Check out these tips for how we keep our classroom calm and relaxed during this stressful season.

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.

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Christmas Books We Love

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Are you looking for Christmas books to share with your students this holiday season? Check out our list of books that will get everyone in the spirit of the holiday season.

There are so many amazing books that use Christmas as a theme that you could read one a day and probably not run out in your lifetime. Christmas picture books make great gifts and they can be read all year round.

Now, we recognize that not all of your students will be celebrating Christmas (and we have lots of book lists for other holidays and celebrations-see the bottom), but for your students that do, we’ve collected a list of our favourite pictures books, graphic novels and novels that bring on the Christmas spirit.

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Are You Avoiding Teaching Art? How to Fix That

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Do you avoid teaching art because you can't handle the mess? Check out this list of ways to manage the mess and get some art lessons for your upper elementary students in the process.

If you are an elementary generalist in Canada, chances are, you are teaching art. That can be challenging if you don’t consider yourself an artist. Here are some tried and true routines we’ve put in place with our classes over the years that have saved our sanity.

Maybe you’ll start enjoying teaching art again!

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Simple and Stunning Remembrance Day Art Projects

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Check out these Remembrance Day art projects that feature poppies. Best of all, we've included all the instructions for these free art projects. Come take a look.

Special occasions are a great time to bring out your favourite art projects, and Remembrance Day is no exception. We teach in a general classroom which means we’re responsible for art lessons all year long. While we like to teach specific skills with different projects, sometimes you have to have art projects around a specific theme for hallway decorating or assemblies.

Remembrance Day is one of those occasions when you don’t have a lot of time for art because you’re just starting to get deep into your lessons, and report cards are just around the corner. That’s why we’ve come up with some simple but stunning projects you can do with your students.

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How to Run Your Guided Reading Instruction

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Are you learning to run reading groups in your classroom as part of your reading instruction? Great! Here's what we do during our reading instruction groups in upper elementary.

You’re giving Guided Reading instruction a try. Great! Do you know what you should be doing with your Guided Reading groups and reading instruction? You’re going to teach students to read. But what does that mean?

We teach in upper elementary (usually Grade four or five) which means we have readers in our classroom reading from Grade one through to Grade six. We have English Language Readers, students with learning difficulties, avid readers and all the ones in between. This means we often need to use more than one strategy to teach reading.

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How to Prepare For Your Reading Groups

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Teaching reading is as much organization and planning as it is about teaching. Get yourself organized with these tips that will get you ready for the whole year from our classroom experts. Come read the whole post.

You’ve been asked to do teach reading as part of your Language Arts program and you’re a little worried. It seems overwhelming. Teaching reading can be challenging.

We’ve been there. It feels like you have to learn so much on the spot and you’re concerned that you won’t do a good job. Here’s the truth. You’ll learn as you go and you will get better at it. Everyone has to start somewhere.

A big part of doing a good job maximizing your teaching time with students comes from being prepared and organized. So, let’s dig in and get you organized so you can do a great job of teaching reading.

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