Ninja Notes

Let us help you teach like a ninja!

Teaching Strategies

Getting to Know Your Students

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Getting to know your students helps with classroom management and lesson planning. Come learn some of the ways we get to know our students and start the school year off right.

Every starts with a new, fresh batch of kids that you want to get to know. Teachers need to know their students for several reasons. You need to understand them and their quirks because you’re going to spend the next ten months in close quarters trying to guide this child through all kinds of experiences. This is why you need to understand who your students really are.

You need to know who they are so you can plan to teach them. It’s just that simple.

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How to Teach Students to Self-Regulate

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Do you need help teaching your students to self-regulate? Managing emotions can be a challenge for some students, but there are practical strategies that can help. Come read the whole post.

What does it mean to self-regulate? Well, the obvious answer means for students to keep their feelings in check. But that’s a bit misleading. It implies that students need to squish down their feelings. Emotional regulation is a skill that students need to be taught. It does not come naturally for everyone.

Students who are having a hard time with self-regulation often appear to be disengaged, rude, helpless or otherwise frustrating for teachers. For many teachers, this means ramping up the WOW factor to try to entice students into wanting to learn. This might mean costumes, balloons, candy and confetti for math-but imagine if it could be something so much simpler?

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Debunking Five Differentiation Myths in the Classroom

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Have you been told that differentiating for your students means more work? Then you're probably doing it wrong. Come unlearn everything you learned about differentiation by debunking these myths.

We thought we had heard all the possible excuses for not differentiating instruction until this week during a professional development session. We were shocked to overhear (and in some cases, be told straight out to our faces) some of the reasons teachers are not differentiating for their students. Here are five differentiation myths we heard and the reasons the people who said them are misinformed.

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Give Your Reading Instruction an Easy Twist

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Twist up your traditional Literature Circles with this fun take that will get your students excited to write about their reading! It's so much fun to add to your Langugae Arts lessons.

For years we’ve done Literature Circles and tried lots of variations, but this one worked really well with our students. The problem with Literature Circles is that some students just don’t like the different activities. This version allows students to have some independence while still having accountability (and something to show for the time). If you are looking for an activity to spice up your reading instruction, look no further than Twisted Literature Circles.

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