Ninja Notes

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Engaging Lessons

Add Great Content to Your Literacy Lessons

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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 literacy lessons (even during distance teaching).

It took fifteen years of teaching and professional development before we felt confident teaching reading to students in upper elementary. 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. Literacy lessons were hard to design and we didn’t really know where to start.

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

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How to Grow a Healthy Classroom with Plants

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Are you looking for ways to bring plants into your class? You can include them in science, but you can also reap the benefits of nature in the classroom. Come take a look to see how you can grow a healthy classroom.

How do you bring nature into your classroom? Or how do you bring your classroom to nature? More and more research shows the benefits of nature to student health and achievement (and yours, too!). Where should you start? We’ve put together a list of things you can do to help connect with nature to create a healthy classroom. Hint hint-they don’t cost money.

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How to Celebrate Asian Heritage Month in Canada

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How will you be acknowledging Asian Heritage Month in Canada? We pulled together resources that you can use in your upper elementary classroom to learn about the contributions of Asian-Canadians throughout history. Come read the whole post.

Every year in May we celebrate Asian Heritage Month. It started in the United States in the 1990s but eventually, it made its way to Canada. We recognize the history and value of Asian Canadians across the country. Asian Canadians strengthen Canadian society, whether they have been here for years or have newly arrived.

Explore Asian Heritage Month in Canada with us.

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How to Take Your History Lessons Off Life Support

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If your history lessons are dropping flat we have just what you need to take your history lessons off life support. Get strategies you can use for any history lesson in your upper elementary classroom.

If you’ve ever thought your history lessons were boring, then truthfully, you had the wrong teacher. Teaching history can be exciting and interesting.

My love of Canadian history came from my favourite teacher of all time, Mr. Perrin. He was a tough teacher who expected the best from everyone, but he had a way of bringing history alive. You felt like you were in the trenches of World War 1 or at the table of a family living through The Great Depression. I underestimated the impact this love of history would have on my life.

Each time I step into my classroom and stand up in front of my students to tell them about some historic event, I still see Mr. Perrin jumping from side to side, role-playing both the French and the Germans in battle. This love of history was so apparent I can’t help but pass this enthusiasm along to my students.

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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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Math Worksheet Games Your Students Will Love

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There are lots of different ways to use a math worksheet to help students learn to collaborate, reinforce skills, and deepen their understanding. Check out these activities that you can set up and use in minutes with the worksheets you already have printed. Save your time with these engaging activities.

We rarely use worksheets because they don’t align with our teaching style. We tend to use a lot of project-based learning or inquiry process activities, but every so often we find that our students need a little extra practice with computation in math. That is when we bring out the worksheets.

However, we don’t often just hand them out and expect our students to fill them in. Here are some ways we use a math worksheet in a less-than-traditional way.

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