Engaging Lessons

You’ll Love These Exciting Winter Classroom Activities

Come see some of the winter classroom activities we do all winter long (and it's always long up here in Canada). We got winter themed math and language arts. Of course we haven't forgotten about going outside for winter activities and winter lessons. We've even included some winter art projects and a digital escape. You can have so much fun during the winter in your upper elementary classroom.

Winters in Canada are long, so technically you could be doing winter classroom activities for most of the school year and you’d still be on track weather wise.

We tend to use winter classroom activities from November through February, especially around Christmas, since many of our students come from different religious backgrounds. Many do not celebrate Christmas and so everyone deserves to do fun activities that aren’t connected to a specific faith or holiday.

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Energize Your Gym Class With Very Little Equipment

by BrainNinjasWP Leave a Comment

Do you have to teach physical education with safety restrictions? Maybe you're trying to teach gym online through distance teaching. We've collected some ideas for activities you can do with your upper elementary class that don't require much equipment. Come check it out.

Are you teaching face to face this year? Do you have to provide some sort of physical education program? Is all your equipment locked up? Are you supposed to be socially distanced? Do you students have to wear masks? What are socially distanced gym activities?

Remember when teaching physical education was so much easier? Remember when you could touch things?

Well, don’t worry.

We’ve been collecting ideas for your socially distanced, equipment-free, mask wearing gym classes. We’ve even found a few ideas for online classes. Let’s get started.

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Remembrance Day Assembly Ideas When You’re Apart

by BrainNinjasWP 1 Comment

Are you trying to plan a Remembrance Day assembly around social distancing requirements? We came up with a way to have your ceremony. Come check out our list of safe and simple Remembrance Day ideas.

Every school across Canada has held a Remembrance Day assembly since the end of the Second World War. In fact, it is written into the School Act in Alberta as a requirement. Schools must have a Remembrance Day assembly on the day closest to November 11. We’ve got some Remembrance Day assembly ideas for you.

What happens when there is a pandemic and it’s no longer safe to gather together in a gym to sing and speak and remember the sacrifices that have been made for the freedom and safety of Canadians?

We’ve been rethinking how we’ll honour our soldiers this year. If you are planning a Remembrance Day assembly, we might have a few ideas for you.

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Setting Up Your Weekly Reading Comprehension Schedule

by BrainNinjasWP 1 Comment

If you use our weekly reading comprehension sets (or maybe you want to learn more), come see how we schedule the first month and get some ideas for how you can use these reading and grammar activities in your classroom whether your instruction happens in the classroom or online.

If you are struggling with reading instruction in your classroom, you’re not alone. Upper elementary teachers are often not trained in how to teach students to read, despite the fact all the students in their classroom are unlikely to be reading at grade level.

We designed our Weekly Reading Comprehension Skills specifically for our students. We needed reading material for science and social studies that was at the right reading level and needed to teach grammar and reading skills. You might want to read this post about how we came up with them: Add Great Content to Your Literacy Lessons.

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Add Great Content to Your Literacy Lessons

by BrainNinjasWP 1 Comment

There are so many things to teach and just not enough time for it all. We started using content from science and social studies to teach grammar and reading comprehension. Game changer! Come find out what we did and how we did it in our upper elementary classroom (even during distance teaching).

It took fifteen years of teaching and professional development before we felt confident in teaching reading to students in upper elementary. Teaching reading is one of the most important skills any teacher is responsible for, but it is often taught by stabbing at strategies until something works-only to find it doesn’t work for the next student.

The most important thing we’ve learned is that reading comprehension skills are also skills related to grammar, word parts, word families and patterns, and writing. The same skills are used in a variety of ways.

If a student missed one of these skills, they trip over it in everything else.

By the time students get to the end of Grade Three, if they aren’t reading at grade level, they are unlikely to catch up. So, what is a teacher to do?

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Boom Goes Our Learning

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Are you wondering what all the fuss is about with Boom Cards? Come learn what they are all about and how they compare to Google Forms.

We have always thought of ourselves as being pretty technically savy, but when the Covid-19 pandemic hit and teachers all around the world were thrust into teaching from a distance, we realized how little we actually knew.

The first thing we did was going through our library of resources that we have in our store and realized that some of them just don’t translate well into digital resources. Some things are just better in person.

This meant we needed to look at new ways to reach our students. We’ve always used Google Classroom and feel pretty comfortable using it with our students, but it lacks the ability to have students practice skills in a way that can checked. We love task cards, but with distance learning they just aren’t the same.

We asked around to see what some of our friends or fellow creators were using and we kept hearing about Boom Learning.

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Engaging Lessons

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