Brain Ninjas

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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 Ultimate Guide to Field Trips

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Fields trips are a great way to extend learning beyond your classroom, but they take some planning and organization. Check out this post jammed packed full of ideas to help you get the most out of your day of learning outside the classroom.

Whether you call it a field trip, excursion, school trip or outing-it’s exhausting! True, field trips can be a lot of fun. They can also be stressful if you are unprepared or if things go wrong. Nobody wants that. All it takes to have an amazing field trip is some planning, a great place to go and a positive attitude. Okay, that might not be all. Check out our ultimate guide to field trips!

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How to Give Student Feedback That’s Amazing

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We try to give students feedback that makes them do the thinking. It's more than a judgment call. Come learn how to take feedback off your teaching plate, but still give students valuable suggestions to improve their work.

How much thinking do you do before you give student feedback?

When I was in grade four I had a teacher tell me that I would have to work very hard if I wanted to be a writer when I grew up because my writing wasn’t very good.

That tiny sentence said in passing one day after I’d shared a story I wrote on my own, has stuck with me for all these years. When you give a student feedback, it sticks with them, even when you don’t think it will. You need to make sure your feedback helps them become better students and guides them without being ultra-judgy and destroying their self-esteem.

This can be a challenging task (especially when we’re overwhelmed with things to get done). Keep reading to find out how you can master the art of giving students feedback.

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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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Everything You Need to Know About Flexible Seating

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Flexible seating is not about buying lots of different seating options. It's about teaching students how to regulate their emotions and learn how they work best. Come learn how we implement flexible seating in our classroom.

Do you want to try flexible seating in your classroom but you aren’t sure where to start? Maybe it’s not the right fit for your classroom management style. Let us walk you through how to start alternative seating options in your classroom so you can decide for yourself if it’s the right fit for you.

Hint hint! It’s not right for everyone.

Our goal is not to convince you to try flexible seating, but instead give you a realistic idea of how flexible seating can be a benefit to your students, problems you’ll encounter and what you should think about before you go buying yourself flexible seating furniture.

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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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10 Engaging Weather Lessons All in One Place

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Are you looking for weather experiments and lessons that you can use in your upper elementary classroom without much prep? We've got you covered with lots of ideas, resources and lesson plans already planned for you. Come take a look!

Are you tired of wasting your valuable time searching high and low for the weather lessons you need for your upper elementary students? There are so many weather activities all over Pinterest, but we find most of the weather lessons are for preschoolers- not exactly what our students need.

We focus on creating materials for teachers who teach the same things to the same age we do. Most of what we create comes from not being able to find what we need. Weather worksheets are just plain boring and not at all aligned with our teaching style, so we’ve created weather experiments and activities that we use in our classroom. We want to help you by putting everything in one place so you don’t have to use all your time collecting lessons from all over the place.

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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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Books About Kindness That Should Be in Every Classroom

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This is a great list of kindness books you can use in your classroom (even an upper elementary classroom) all year round. Use them for Pink Shirt Day, World Kindness Day or to foster a kind environment for all your students.

We love picture books and use them all the time in our classroom as mentor texts or to illustrate a writer’s craft. We love books that highlight kindness and use them all year with our students. We’re always on the search for new books, but here are some of the best kindness books we’ve found and use all year.

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Uplifting Picture Books for Lunar New Year

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Do you need a list of books to use for Chinese New Year, Korean New Year or Vietnamese New Year? Luna New Year is on its way and we've searched for some great books you can use to learn about these traditions.

Usually, we talk about Chinese New Year. Did you know that many other countries celebrate the New Year at the same time? In Vietnam, it is called Tết. It is called Seollal in South Korea. We find one of the best ways to help our students understand different traditions is to read books about the different Lunar New Year celebrations.

These New Year celebrations are based on the lunar calendar. The lunar calendar is calculated using the movement of the Earth around the Sun and the Moon around the Earth. The lunar new year is usually celebrated sometime in January or February. This time of year is a time when families gather, share food and participate in local traditions.

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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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