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How to Celebrate Poem in Your Pocket Day

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Are you looking for ways to celebrate a love of poetry with your upper elementary students? Try taking part in Poem in Your Pocket Day as part of National Poetry Month. This can be done any time of year and is a great activity to explore poetry throughout your school. Come read the whole post to get ideas how you can celebrate poetry.

We’re hosting a “Poem in Your Pocket” day as a celebration of completing our poetry unit in Language Arts. It coincides with the National Poem In Your Pocket Day held each year in April. It’s coming up soon! You can join us this year even if you haven’t taught poetry in your classroom yet!

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How to Teach Multiple Perspectives in the Classroom

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How do you teach controversial or challenging issues in your classroom? We try to teach students about multiple perspectives so they can learn to proper research and debate issues that are important to them. This is even more important in the age of fake news. Come check out these activities you can do in your upper elementary classroom to teach students to investigate multiple perspectives.

The Canadian news is flooded with discussions about pipelines and where they should or shouldn’t be built. So, how do we address the multiple perspectives of different issues in the classrooms? It’s important to be impartial while presenting all the facts from both sides of the issue.

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How to Prank Your Students

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Are you looking for a fun but harmless prank for April Fool's Day? Pranks are great any time of year and they are a great way to bond with your students. Check out these free and easy to use pranks for your upper elementary classroom.

Do you like a lighthearted and fun prank? Do you have students that enjoy a good laugh? Are you looking for a way to celebrate April Fools’ Day? We were always struggling with ways to prank our students in a fun and caring way, and we’ve come up with a few great ones over the past few years.

If you have the kind of relationship with your students where everyone can enjoy a lighthearted, silly prank, then you’re doing something right. We are very clear with our students about what does or does not make for a good prank.

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How to Differentiate Using Choices

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Sometimes all students need to feel successful is the chance to make a choice so they feel like they have some control. Come learn how to leverage choices and boost your students' engagement.

How would you feel if you knew you were a wonderful writer but the only way you could express yourself was through modern dance? What would you do if you had to recite your report card comments by memory to each and every parent? How would you feel if you were given the choice to write your report cards any way YOU want? (Ours would be invisible!)

Imagine how different your life would be if you were given the choice to do or say certain things.

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Use Pink Shirt Day to Make a Difference in the World

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Are you looking for ways to teach your students how to stand up against bullying? Here is a list of activities you can try including activities for Pink Shirt Day, International Day of Pink or World Kindness Day.

Pink Shirt Day is coming again. Depending on where you live in Canada, you might observe this anti-bullying awareness day in February or September (or even April or May). Regardless of when you wear your pink shirt, the movement to bring awareness to bullying has begun to spread worldwide. Do you need an activity to do in your upper elementary classroom?

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How to Work Through the Design Process

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The design process is useful for working through a problem. We use it in science and in our makerspace. Come learn about the process and get some design thinking posters for your classroom.

Here’s a quick lesson you can do with your students to learn how to use your Makerspace while teaching students to enjoy the process of solving problems. Problem-solving is a skill that needs to be taught, learned, and practiced. The design process uses simple steps to help alleviate frustration between creating, testing and refining. When all of your students have a common language, it can help facilitate conversations between them. Come learn how we use the design process in our classroom.

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