Brain Ninjas

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Teaching Strategies

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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How to Run Your Guided Reading Instruction

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Are you learning to run reading groups in your classroom as part of your reading instruction? Great! Here's what we do during our reading instruction groups in upper elementary.

You’re giving Guided Reading instruction a try. Great! Do you know what you should be doing with your Guided Reading groups and reading instruction? You’re going to teach students to read. But what does that mean?

We teach in upper elementary (usually Grade four or five) which means we have readers in our classroom reading from Grade one through to Grade six. We have English Language Readers, students with learning difficulties, avid readers and all the ones in between. This means we often need to use more than one strategy to teach reading.

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How to Prepare For Your Reading Groups

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Teaching reading is as much organization and planning as it is about teaching. Get yourself organized with these tips that will get you ready for the whole year from our classroom experts. Come read the whole post.

You’ve been asked to do teach reading as part of your Language Arts program and you’re a little worried. It seems overwhelming. Teaching reading can be challenging.

We’ve been there. It feels like you have to learn so much on the spot and you’re concerned that you won’t do a good job. Here’s the truth. You’ll learn as you go and you will get better at it. Everyone has to start somewhere.

A big part of doing a good job maximizing your teaching time with students comes from being prepared and organized. So, let’s dig in and get you organized so you can do a great job of teaching reading.

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How to Teach Small Groups and Keep the Rest of the Class Busy

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Are you trying to teach small groups at a table when there are non-stop interruptions? Get some practical tips on how to get the other kids working while you teach. It can be done and we want to help. Come read more!

Hands down, this is the biggest question we get asked on a regular basis when working with teachers in the classroom. In fact, this is a question we ask ourselves daily. What will the other students be doing while I meet with my Guided Reading groups?

First of all, before you can make your time with your Guided Reading groups count, you need to establish the routines in your classroom. If you don’t have your classroom management down pat, your small group instruction time will be constantly interrupted and your students won’t progress. Nothing good will come from everyone being frustrated.

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Help! I Don’t Know How to Teach Reading

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Are you being asked to teach reading but you haven't learned how? That's because education programs don't actually teach teachers how to teach reading. This training is usually done on the job, but don't worry. We've got everything you need to get started with guided reading.

Have you been asked to do Guided Reading or teach reading in your classroom, but have absolutely no experience and don’t even know where to start? We’ve been there. Let us share our combined years of experience that took us from beginning teachers to literacy specialists.

This is the beginning of a series that will get you set up to do Guided Reading in your classroom, but honestly, it is a long game. Take the pressure off yourself now because you’ll have to give yourself time to get this whole how to teach reading thing down. We’ve been teaching reading for over fifteen years and there is always room to improve. There are always new things to learn.

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How to Differentiate For Your Students in Less Time

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Learn how to differentiate for your students in less time with these strategies. These are practical ways to take some of the planning off your plate and still provide your students with the supports they need. Come read the whole post.

One of the biggest issues teachers talk about is how much time it takes to differentiate their instruction for the needs of the different learners in their complex classrooms. All teachers want to help, reach and teach all their students, but understanding how to do this can be a challenge especially for teachers who are new to teaching, new to a grade level or new to the types of challenges and barriers a student is facing.

Full Disclosure: Differentiated instruction is hard.

And there seems to be some sort of unwritten out there that everyone should be good at it the first time you try.

Gee, no pressure.

Well, what if we could give you some tried and true strategies that have worked for us? We all know differentiation is important, but what does it mean to truly differentiate for everyone?

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How to Differentiate Your Instruction

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Differetiating your instruction does not mean you need a different lesson plan for every students. Come learn how to differentiate in your classroom without writing a million different plans.

You have a complex classroom full of complex behaviours and learning challenges. Do you worry about how to teach all of them to the best of your ability? Are you spending all your time trying to differentiate instruction but feeling like you’re spinning in circles not getting anywhere?

Differentiation means different things to different people. We’re here to work through the clutter and streamline the planning process. Then you can differentiate for the different learners you have in your classroom without spending all your time planning.

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The Trouble With Task Cards and How to Fix It

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Do you think task cards are more work than they're worth? Maybe you're using them wrong? Or maybe you're using the wrong ones. Let us help you navigate the challenges and get you more bang for your time!

Do you need some convincing about how you can effectively use task cards in the classroom? Do you like the idea of task cards but don’t have the time to make them? All that printing, laminating and cutting can look like it’s not worth your time. Well, we have some solutions to get the most out of task cards for your students in the least amount of time for you. Keep on reading to find out how we use them and why we think they’re so valuable.

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How to Teach Students to Self-Assess

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Do your students need to learn how to reflect on their work accurately? Do they miss big parts of a task or need your help to figure out what is left to do? Come teach your students how to self-assess so you can free up your time with this great lesson and free bulletin board set.

How often do your students tell you they are all done with their work or assignment and the second you look at it, you notice they’ve missed a huge part of the task? Teaching your students to self-reflect accurately is very challenging because students are usually unrealistic. They are either too hard on themselves or clueless about how little they’ve done.

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Practical Strategies for Reluctant Readers

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Do you have students who avoid reading? Check out these step-by-step effective strategies for reluctant readers so you can get all of your students to enjoy reading.

Do you have students in your classroom you would label as reluctant readers? A reluctant reader is usually considered to be a person who doesn’t read for pleasure, but we’re about to debunk that myth and help you out in your classroom by giving you strategies to engage reluctant readers in ways you didn’t even know you needed.

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What is Concept Based Instruction?

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Concept Based Instruction? Is this just a new fad? Hoping it will pass and nothing will change? This is the new direction in education and we believe is here to stay even if it isn’t mandated. It just makes sense! It took us awhile to wrap our heads around what this looks like in a classroom…practically. And we are still learning! Here is what we’ve learned so far.

What is it?
Concept based instruction focuses on using content (topics, facts, and skills) to uncover the actual learning concept and the relationship between different concepts. It is multi-dimensional and looks at what students need to know, understand and do. The learning of overarching concepts helps students to transfer the learning to new situations. The goal is to get students to think at higher levels, to have students move from just learning facts to being able to make generalizations that apply to new learning. Familiar with Understanding by Design? Planning concept based instruction parallels backwards design. Familiar with Bloom’s Taxonomy? Concept based instruction includes different levels of Bloom’s taxonomy.

What does “concept” mean?
A concept refers to a big idea that students must understand and not just know and do. It is abstract, timeless and universal. For example, a traditional unit of study might include the study of the War of 1812, or World War I or World War II.  Using a concept based approach, the concept could be: power, technology, conflict or identity (among other possibilities).  If identity was the chosen concept then the big idea could be framed as:  War can shape the way a country thinks about itself and the way other people perceive it. If technology was the chosen concept then the big idea could be framed as: Technology can change the outcomes of war over time. In both of these examples the War of 1812, World War I and World War II are used as ‘case studies’ to exemplify the chosen concept.

This post just barely scratches the surface but gets us thinking about the idea of concept based instruction. We will be exploring the different aspects of concept based teaching in a series of short posts. What do you already know about concept based instruction? What are you hoping to learn? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below.

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Research Skills: How to Teach Text Features

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Understanding text features is one way to help your students with reading comprehension. Come learn how we teach our students about text features while reading nonfiction texts. We even had some free tools for you to use in your upper elementary classroom.

How often do you give your students a book and they can’t find any information in it? It seems if a page isn’t blinking and flashing they can’t seem to work it. Explicitly teaching text features can help your students understand how to process information better. This won’t just help with their reading, but it will help with all of their research, following directions and locating information quickly in all their subject areas.

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