Ninja Notes

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Teaching Strategies

How to Use Collaborative Tasks to Create Classroom Community

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Collaborative tasks help students learn to work together toward the classroom community they want to achieve. Read more about how we use collaborative tasks to build classroom community and learn more about the types of tasks we use.

One of the most effective classroom management strategies is the classroom community you build with your students. We start our school year with collaborative tasks to help students get to know each other. These activities help students learn to communicate and build trust. Collaborative tasks help students learn to work together toward the classroom community they want to achieve.

Come learn more about how we use collaborative tasks in our classroom.

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Make Wellness Lessons a Priority in Your Classroom

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Wellness skills are life-long skills that benefit everyone. It's important for students to see these skills in action throughout their days if they are going to build them into their entire lives. Come learn how we do that every day.

When the health and wellness curriculum just becomes a list of things to teach, it really misses the mark. If the goal of health and wellness lessons are to teach student life-long ways to take care of themselves, it should be woven throughout their days at school in addition to explicit teaching. We’ve evaluated some of the ways we put our wellness lessons front and centre in our classroom.

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How to Set the Noise Level in Your Classroom

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Is the noise level in your classroom driving you up the wall? When noise gets out of hand, it's time for a reset. Come learn what we discovered and how you can make it work for you.

Do you ever feel your classroom just keeps getting louder and louder until you want to take your ears off? As your students get more comfortable, the noise level can get out of hand. Of course, the activity going on in your room can often impact the noise, but your body language and your tone of voice play a bigger role than you may realize. This is a real experiment we tried on our students.

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How to Include Different Types of Writing in Your Classroom

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Are you looking for ways to include the different types of writing in your classroom each day? Come see how we do it in our upper elementary classroom.

Over the years we’ve attended hundreds of hours of professional development for teaching students to write. Our school has tried out resources from Ruth Guthrie and the 6+ Traits of Writing, Barbara Mariconda and Empowering Writers and even Lucy Calkins and her Writers’ Workshop model. None of these were perfect. Some students did well with some of the lessons and some students didn’t see a lot of growth in their writing. Some students learned to follow a formula but struggled with being creative. How do you include different types of writing in your daily writing?

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How to Teach Successful Long Division Strategies

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Do your upper elementary students struggle with long division? We've collected all our best tools for helping students master long division and you can have them all. Come read this post and see how we can help your students feel better about math.

Long division has long been one of the most challenging concepts for students in Grade 4 and Grade 5 to master. There are a few reasons students struggle with long division, so we’ve tried to break down some of the ways we set our students up for success.

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22 Amazing Ways to Use Word Wall Words

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Are you trying to use a word wall, but are running out of ways to make it worth the time? Come check out this big list of ideas for how to make your word wall interactive and useful for all your students.

What are word wall words?

A word wall is an organized display of a collection of words that are usually left posted on a wall or bulletin board for a long period of time. The words are typically high-frequency words. Posted word wall words can provide a visual reference for students throughout a unit of study, a term, or a year. Teachers and students use these words continuously. 

But are you guilty of hanging up your words and then forgetting about them? Come learn how we make our word wall more interactive.

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