Ninja Notes

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Classroom Tips

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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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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What Goes in a Makerspace?

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Check out this great list of imakerspace supplies to fill your makerspace! Get creative and have some fun. The best part is that you probably already have so many things in our list. Come read it!

You’ve decided to have a makerspace because you understand the value of the learning that can take place. If you aren’t quite sure, maybe you should go back to our post: Why Should You Build Makerspaces Immediately? It talks about the reasons a makerspace can be valuable in your school or classroom.

What should you put in it? Anything you want. Start small. We put out origami paper and a book during the first week just to see what would happen. (Turns out the answer to that question is lots of paper frogs.) But seriously, we made a list of potential makerspace supplies.

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How to Create a Community Culture in Your Multi-Grade Classroom

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How do you teach a split class or combined grades? Start by combining your students into a culture where they get to know each other and create a classroom community that your students will love.

How do we create a community culture where all students feel they are equal and belong? It turns out we’ve had more combined-grade classes than straight-grade classes since we began teaching, so we can’t imagine teaching any other way. First of all, we call it a combined class rather than a split class. It’s the first thing we do with parents because our combined classes are not like the old ‘split’ classes.

When students come into our classroom on the first day of school, they immediately collect into two different groups-the lower grade and upper grade. They don’t know each other well and like to sit with their friends. We don’t give students a seating plan right away (or sometimes at all) so we can see which relationships form or are already in place, but then we slowly start changing their mindset about the combined class.

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Being Thankful in the Classroom

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Canadian Thanksgiving is early in he year, which is why we call the time from Back to School until thanksgiving the beta period. Come find out what we use it for and get loads of resources you can use to be thankful in the classroom or acknowledge Thanksgiving.

The year has started. Things are starting to settle and it’s time to count your blessings in the classroom. We call the start of the year through Thanksgiving (well, Canadian Thanksgiving on the second Monday of October) the beta period. It’s the time of year to try things out, get to know the students, build relationships, and set up the year for success. It can be hard to be thankful in the classroom unless we take a moment to sit back and list the things we are grateful for.

The beta period is not the time of year we spend getting deep into the content. We review. We read. And we talk about what is coming next. We check out our skills and show what we can or can’t do.

Most of all, we celebrate all the things were are thankful for in our classroom. Keep reading to see how we spend this special time of year.

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How to Create a Sense of Agency in the Classroom

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Are you struggling with classroom management? This strategy changed our entire approach. No charts, games or reward systems! Just classroom management that works! Come and read this post to make a change in your classroom today.

Imagine a classroom where the students monitored themselves-and, not in that “hall pass police officer” type of way. Imagine a classroom where students encouraged each other to keep the room tidy, put things away and treat each other with respect. We call this a sense of agency.

It’s possible because each year we turn out a classroom full of polite and respectful students, but it takes work. Students need to be taught how to make decisions that are positive and what to do when they make a mistake. Creating a sense of agency is just as important as all the math and reading skills. It’s the key to classroom management. Want to know how?

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