Ninja Notes

Let us help you teach like a ninja!

Classroom Tips

How to Thrive During Your Student Teaching

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Are you ready for your student teaching placement? Come read through some of our best advice to help get you started on the right foot. There are even some free resources to get you started.

Of course, you want to be a great teacher, so congratulations on getting the chance to be a teacher! Your student teaching experience is usually the first chance you’ll get to take control of the classroom. Many factors can come into play and you might have lots of “when I have my own classroom” moments, but use this time as a chance to learn and ask questions.

We’ve been lucky enough to have amazing supervising teachers when we began our careers and it was important to us to take on student teachers when we were ready for it. Passing on our knowledge is important. This is all the advice we have given to our student teachers over the years and we hope it can help you, too.

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9 Quick Games to Teach Your Students

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Quick games are a great way to help your students transition, build relationships, foster teamwork and give your students a brain break between instruction and working. We've pulled together some of our favourites. Come read the whole post.

The pressure is always on teachers to move through the curriculum and to use their learning time as wisely as possible. We agree. There are already enough interruptions to learning these days that you don’t need to create more distractions. So, why would we encourage you to place games with your students? Quick games are one way we build relationships, teach students to follow directions, teach our classroom management expectations and foster teamwork between classmates. Come read some of our favourite quick games you can use in your upper elementary classroom or with your fellow teachers.

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How to Bring Social Studies Lessons to Life

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Are your social studies lessons dry and boring? Are they missing different perspectives and seem a little textbookish? We've put together a list of ways to make your lessons engaging and relevant for your modern students. Come read!

If you’ve ever had an amazing teacher who brought history to life for you, then you probably enjoyed learning. A great teacher throws away the social studies textbook. He or she allows students to explore history in real and relevant ways. This teaches about the past, but also how to learn and think critically about the future.

We love teaching social studies, but honestly, we very rarely teach it using the textbook. For one thing, textbooks provide a pretty condensed and cleansed version of the past. The reading level is way above our students’ comprehension skills. We use textbooks as reference materials only.

That means we need to have a way to bring social studies lessons alive for our students.

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Quiet Classroom Games You’ll Love

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Do you need a quick and quiet classroom game? We've put together some of our favourite games that are perfect to give you a break, use up a little time or have some fun. Come read through this list and keep it handy.

Every once in a while, you need a few minutes to regroup, handle a student issue, clean up a disaster, or smooth out a transition. There will be moments in your teaching day where the lessons don’t line up, or you’re waiting on someone else.

Everyone knows silent ball. It’s a quiet game where students toss an object around the room to each other but cannot make any noise while doing it. Our students have loved silent ball over the years, but we like to mix things up with a variety of activities that will keep students engaged.

We’ve collected some of our favourite calm and quiet activities that you can use almost anywhere and almost anytime. Keep this list of quiet classroom games handy (and maybe even learn a few to take with you on that next field trip).

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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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