Brain Ninjas

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Classroom Tips

Are You Feeling Like a Failing Teacher?

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Do you feel like you are failing your students? Are you struggling to keep up? Come let us help you get through the rough days.

This is the time of year when we question whether or not we can continue teaching. Reflection is important. It’s how we grow, but maybe you’re feeling like a failing teacher.

It doesn’t matter that we have years of experience behind us and the school year is finished, but there’s just something about this time of year that puts us in a funk. Add a pandemic into the mix and there’s even more confusion.

Even more, new teachers really start to question whether or not they can cut it as a teacher. This is the time of year when we tend to field questions from our new-to-school teachers and over and over we hear the same issues.

Maybe some of these sound like you, so before you throw in the towel and quit everything you’ve worked so hard to achieve, please keep reading.

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How to Reduce Paper Clutter in Your Classroom

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The classroom seems to be a vortex of paper that piles up and makes organizing it even more complicated. Come learn some of the ways you can tame the paper clutter in your classroom.

Is your classroom drowning in paper? It can happen so easily. Between student work, office memos, plans, reminders and reports, your classroom can easily become a fire hazard or, at the very least, a tree massacre.

Here are some of our best ways to reduce the amount of paper that keeps creeping into your classroom.

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Books You’ll Love With LGBTQ+ Characters

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There are so many great characters in so many books these days and some of them feature characters from the LGBTQ+ community. Come see if your favourite book made the list.

We teach grades four and five, which is a time in a student’s life when they are just figuring out who they are and how they want the world to see them. It’s a special time for students and we like to have books in our classroom that represent everyone regardless of culture, colour, religion, gender, identity or orientation. LGTBQ+ characters are included in the books, lessons and discussions our students see in our classroom.

Students need to see people of all backgrounds.

One way we do this is through books. Our classroom and school libraries are filled with books that feature characters from all backgrounds including members of the LGBTQ+ community.

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The Secrets of Social Emotional Learning for Kids

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Do your students have difficulty regulating their emotions? Do you need strategies to help teach students about feelings and how to calm down? This is the post for you. Come read the whole post and get practical strategies you can implement today.

We believe firmly in social-emotional learning (or SEL), self-regulation and teaching students about feelings. Students today struggle with identifying feelings, managing their emotions and staying focused.

Let’s not get into all the causes of why some students are unable to describe and manage their feelings, but more and more instructional time becomes wasted unless we intentionally teach students about to self-regulate.

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Five Types of Teachers and How To Deal With Them

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One of the most difficult things about teaching is how it can be isolating from one moment to exasperating the next. Dealing with coworkers can be a real challenge. Come read about the different types of teachers and how to deal with them.

Disclaimer: This article is meant for fun. We are not actually criticising anyone or their work ethic, but let’s be honest, we all know these types of teachers. Keep reading for our advice on how to handle it.  

Think about the last staff meeting you attended. It’s time to pass around the volunteer sign-up because it’s going to be a busy month. That’s always the intention, but by the end of the month there are usually a lot of hard feelings and regret over glitter, balloons, and most of all missed class time (because everyone needs to sit around and listen to first graders read their research reports on goats for 45 minutes. ARE YOU KIDDING ME?)

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Quick and Colourful Activities for Holi the Festival of Colours

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Are you looking for upper elementary classroom activities you can use to learn more about the Holi Festival of Colours? We've gathered resources and books that are perfect for your classroom. Come take a look.

Learning about different traditions allows students to explore people and their cultures around the world. And it’s a cheap way to travel! We collected activities for Holi so you can travel with your students.

Holi is an ancient Hindu festival that originates and is widely celebrated in India. Although different regions of India have their own traditions and variations, they all share one thing, it’s so much fun! As people have moved around the world, settling in other countries such as Canada they have brought this celebration with them.

Many non-Hindu people around the world also celebrate Holi. In fact, this tradition has inspired all kinds of different events. It is often used to support all kinds of good causes, like children with chronic or life-threatening conditions and is incorporated into many different types of fundraisers.

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How to Accidentally Teach Helplessness to Students

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Are you accidentally teaching your students to rely on you all the time? Are you followed around your classroom because your students cannot do anything on their own? Are you accidentally teaching helplessness? You need this post. Come learn how to build independence in your classroom.

Is it possible that your willingness to help your students might actually be hindering their growth? As teachers, we intend to help our students learn as much as possible as we are often measured by our students’ successes, but is our eagerness to help accidentally sabotaging our students? Do you teach helplessness?

We work with many different professionals as a classroom teacher. We deal with other teachers, interventionists, support staff such as Educational Assistants, speech-language supports and then outside systems such as social workers, occupational therapists and private medical professionals. The goal of all these people is to have students be successful.

But sometimes students need to struggle. When you take away the struggle, you might actually be preventing learning from happening. In fact, you might be reinforcing negative behaviours such as learned helplessness.

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How to Build Community With Theme Days for School

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Theme days are a great way to build community and school spirit, but it's important to have clear rules about what is or is not appropriate. Come read through our guidelines and some of the days we've tried.

Have you been put in charge of school spirit days? Looking for ideas? Well, we surveyed everyone we could think of everywhere we could think of to come up with a list of possible theme days you could host at your school.

Dressing up can come with its challenges. It’s great fun for some, but it can also be stressful for others. No matter what the theme, we encourage you to always make it voluntary, fun and no judging (for best or anything else).

Keep in mind not all your students will have access to the things they would need in order to dress up so no one should ever be excluded. And, you DO NOT have to have a dress up day every week of school. It’s ok to keep it simple and just have the occasional day. That’s what makes it special.

And remember, some theme days work better for different age groups. As with any theme day, the day is supposed to be fun. If there is any chance there will be cultural inappropriateness, racism or insensitivity to others, the theme day is not right for your school.

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Teacher Tired Habits to Break

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If you're tagging #teachertired all the time it's time for you to start changing some habits. We've got some ideas for your wake up call to get your productivity in check and save your personal time.

If you are often tagging #teachertired on your social media posts, then maybe it’s time you stopped joking about it and did something to change. Being tired is part of life, but if you are so tired that you cry in your car on a daily basis, then it’s time to break some bad teacher-tired habits.

This is not about judgment. This comes from love-because we have been there. We have cried in the car. We’ve stress-eaten crappy food. Sometimes we’ve taken out our tiredness in our family relationships. We’ve felt guilty for not being a good enough teacher, not being a good enough spouse, not being a good enough parent and not being a good enough cook (no one said it was rational). We often used humour to joke about how tired we were, but the real problem was that we kept letting it continue.

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How to Calm the Chaos in December

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Don't allow the festive season to cause chaos in your classroom. Check out these tips for how we keep our classroom calm and relaxed during this stressful season.

December can be a great month. It can also be exhausting. Your schedule gets tossed aside for concert rehearsals, bad weather and overstimulation of the little darlings in your care. How do you teach when your whole schedule needs to be tossed? This is our guide to calm the chaos.

There are three whole weeks of learning that are supposed to happen in December, but it can be VERY challenging to fit it all in. Here is what we do to mitigate the chaos.

While December is the month with the most disruptions for us, these ideas can work any time of year.

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Christmas Books We Love

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Are you looking for Christmas books to share with your students this holiday season? Check out our list of books that will get everyone in the spirit of the holiday season.

There are so many amazing books that use Christmas as a theme that you could read one a day and probably not run out in your lifetime. Christmas picture books make great gifts and they can be read all year round.

Now, we recognize that not all of your students will be celebrating Christmas (and we have lots of book lists for other holidays and celebrations-see the bottom), but for your students that do, we’ve collected a list of our favourite pictures books, graphic novels and novels that bring on the Christmas spirit.

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Are You Avoiding Teaching Art? How to Fix That

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Do you avoid teaching art because you can't handle the mess? Check out this list of ways to manage the mess and get some art lessons for your upper elementary students in the process.

If you are an elementary generalist in Canada, chances are, you are teaching art. That can be challenging if you don’t consider yourself an artist. Here are some tried and true routines we’ve put in place with our classes over the years that have saved our sanity.

Maybe you’ll start enjoying teaching art again!

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