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Why Should You Build Makerspaces Immediately?

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Makerspaces give your students the change to be creative, solve problems and learn in new ways. They add to your STEM, STEAM, science or art lessons too. Still not sure why you should have a makerspace? Check out this post!

Makerspaces. They seem to be all the buzz, but the concept that drives them isn’t new. For many years, we’ve been focused on directing every moment of our students’ lives. As parents, the lives of children are scheduled to the point they never have a moment to decide for themselves what to do. As teachers, if our students don’t look like they’re working, we worry that someone will think they aren’t learning. So when did we decide as adults that play is a bad thing?

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How to Bring Indigenous Culture into Art Lessons

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One way to show appreciation for Indigenous artists is to study their work as you would any great artist. We put together some of the ways we incorporate learning about Indigenous artists and other aspects of culture in Canada in one post. Come read more.

Incorporating the stories and culture of Indigenous people is important to us. It’s woven throughout our subject areas, but we often look for other places to provide opportunities to bring cultures together. We’ve had several students who share their Cree and Dene cultures with us. Other years we’ve had no one in our classroom with a direct connection to our Indigenous People. We want all of our students to feel connected to the history of our country and the people who were here first. One way we do this is by exploring the works of Indigenous artists in Canada.

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Heart Art Projects You’ll Love

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Heart art projects are great any time of year. We collected some of our favourite art projects that use basic materials like markers, pastels and crayons and put all the instructions in one blog post. Come see which one you can make with your upper elementary class for Valentine's Day, Pink Shirt Day or just to show how kind your students can be.

We love to create art projects that use simple shapes but teach students different techniques. Heart art projects are perfect around Valentine’s Day, but they are a universal symbol that can be done any time of year. These art projects are some of the favourites that we use year after year. Best of all, they mostly use common materials you can find in most schools.

Check out these heart art projects that you can use to decorate your classroom, make gifts or share the love.

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You Got Your First Teaching Job…Now What?

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Congratulations! You got your first teaching job and are now an elementary school teacher. All that hard work has paid off and you are gainfully employed in your vocation (or calling or job to pay the bills-your choice). Now the real work begins. But don’t panic. We’ve been there! Read what you need to know to get your new job started off on the right foot.

Congratulations for getting yor first teaching job. Now the hard work begins. But where do you start? Don't worry. We've got a list of things you can do to get your school year started off right (and none of them involve teaching yet). Come have a read and put your mind at ease.
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How to Use Logic Puzzles in the Classroom

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Logic puzzles are good for your brain. They encourage reading for information, tracking and critical thinking. Come learn how we use logic puzzles in our upper elementary classroom.

Logic puzzles are a series of written clues that readers use to fill in a chart. The chart shows which items match each other. These types of puzzles have been a life-long favourite and come in a variety of levels of difficulty. We created puzzles for our students to solve for fun, but have also looked at how solving logic puzzles helps students become better readers. Read on to learn the ways you can use logic puzzles in your classroom to help teach reading.

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Free Winter Classroom Activities Worth Scooping Up

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Are you looking for some simple and free classroom activities to keep your students busy during the long winter months? We collected many winter activities for language arts, math, scrience, art and some just for fun and put them all together in one big post. You can use these activities for instruction or give them to your students during indoor recess on those long winter days. Come take a look!

Depending on where you live, winter can be a very long season. In northern Canada, where we teach, winter can start as early as October. It continues up to the end of March. That means we are always on the lookout for winter classroom activities to use in class. More importantly, we use them during those dreaded indoor recesses when it is just too cold to go outside.

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