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How to Teach Research Skills With Google Search

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Do your students struggle to find information online? Do they understand how to use search tools, refine their search or use basic keywords? Come learn some of the ways we teach our students to find information online quickly and efficiently.

Do your students suck at researching topics? Do they just copy and paste from Wikipedia? Can they find accurate information on their own or do they all just end up at Wikipedia and cite Google Search as a source? Can they use text features or find an actual book?

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How to Add Some Drama to Your Classroom

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Add some drama to your classroom to bring your lessons to life. Check out these practical ways to spice up lessons with dramatic flair for your students. Add some drama to your upper elementary classroom with these activities and lessons.

A strange thing happened this year. Our students were so dramatic-and by that we mean we started using drama in the classroom as a way to help teach, review and reinforce our learning in every subject area. The kids loved it-even the shy and quiet ones.

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You Need to Stop Overlooking Health Class!

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When you skip health class, you tell students it's not important. Use these engaging health and wellness lessons to reinstate health and wellness in your classroom.

Are you having trouble fitting health lessons into your plans because you already have too much to teach? Stop overlooking the value of health class! You can leverage health lessons to teach reading and writing. You can help students in your class be organized, play safely and get along with each other. So why are you ignoring all these important outcomes?

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Find the Fake News and So Much More

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We need to teach students how to think critically about what they see online. Check out these tips and lessons you can use in your clasroom to help turn your students in to responsible digital citizens. Digital citizenship and online safety should be a priority in every upper elementary classroom.

We realized the importance of teaching critical thinking and fact-checking one day on Facebook. One ninja-mother-in-law posted an article about an actor that had died-but the actor had died FIVE years earlier. Yet, there she was just reposting like crazy. A dog with a piece of ham on its face was her next post and that was when we started writing our digital citizenship and online safety resource. Clearly, digital citizenship is a skill to be learned by many these days.

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10 Things We Do On the First Day of School

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We use this routine for our first day of school each year. It works for most upper elementary classrooms and is sure to get your new school year started off right.

Be honest. You either LOVE the first day of school or hate it. As a teacher, it’s a fresh start to get back to spending quality time with these little darlings. For us, it’s always a chance to correct things we did in the past and start all over again, but there are ten things we do on the first day of school that help our whole year run smoothly. Turn back to school into a great time of year for you and your students. Keep on reading to find out how to make your first day back go smoothly.

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Activities for Orange Shirt Day and National Truth and Reconciliation Day

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If you are looking for activities you can use to observe Orange Shirt Day which is also called National Truth and Reconciliation Day we have collected several in this blog post. Come learn about resources you can use in your upper elementary classroom.

Orange Shirt Day is recognized each year on September 30. Check your local area for activities so you can participate in acknowledging Residential School survivors. As of 2021, the Canadian government has declared September 30 a day of National Truth and Reconciliation.

It is important to educate everyone about Canada’s wrongs so we can learn from them. We need to repair the damage that has been done. We have searched out some student-friendly resources teachers can use in their classrooms to teach students about Residential Schools because Every Child Matters. Keep reading to get a list of resources you can use in your classroom.

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