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
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.
[Read more…] about How to Set the Noise Level in Your ClassroomHow to Leverage the Power of YouTube in Your Classroom
As you know, YouTube is a wealth of resources for professional learning, both for fun and for learning how to fix your broken gas dryer (ninjas like to fix their own things, after all). Using YouTube in the classroom with your students is also a powerful tool (assuming you are allowed to)! Schools and districts that block YouTube are living in the wrong century! To us, it would be like banning a library (but that is a whole other issue and worthy of its own post).
[Read more…] about How to Leverage the Power of YouTube in Your ClassroomHow to Include Different Types of Writing in Your 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?
[Read more…] about How to Include Different Types of Writing in Your Classroom3 Ways to Support Introverts in the Classroom
Despite what some people might know about me, I’m an introvert and as a student, being painfully shy made learning difficult. As a teacher, it’s made me acutely aware that it’s important to support introverts in the classroom. We need to advocate for their needs. Check out some of the ways we support introverts in the classroom.
[Read more…] about 3 Ways to Support Introverts in the ClassroomWays to Bring Graphing Activities into Your Classroom Daily
It always surprises me when I hear teachers saying they are starting a math unit on graphing and statistics. Reading a graph or a chart is a skill we use throughout many subject areas. Looking at patterns in statistics comes up in science and social studies all the time. Here are the ways we weave graphing activities into our classroom all year long and throughout the different subject areas.
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