Ninja Notes

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Scary Halloween Books for Your Classroom Library

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Are you looking for some scary Halloween books for your upper elementary classroom library? We've collected titles of great Halloween books from our students and update our list all the time. Come have a read!

Whether you’re creating a Halloween-themed classroom library or planning some eerie read-alouds, these titles deliver thrills, chills, and laughs. Many are proudly written or illustrated by Canadian talent. We love to share scary books all year. Our students ask for them. Many of them want to read a haunted story or something that is a little creepy. You don’t have to read scary Halloween books at Halloween, but that is part of the fun.

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How to Host Your Own Book Debates and Battles

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Inspire a love of reading and encourage your students to choose new books by using book debates. We've outlined the process to use this in your upper elementary classroom today based on the format for Canada Reads. Come take a look.

If you live in Canada, you might have heard of Canada Reads. Canada Reads is an annual “battle of the books” competition organized and broadcast by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC). We have enjoyed the event for years and thought about how much fun it would be to do the same style of book debates in our classroom. Students love a good battle. Come learn about how it went and how you can host your own book debates.

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How to Unfold Geometry: Books to Shape Your Unit

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Picture books are a great way to inspire your students in a visual way. Geometry has a lot of new vocabulary which can be challenging for students, so use books to help students learn new words and concepts. Come check out this list of geometry books and questions you can use while reading them with your upper elementary students.

Are you using geometry books in your math classes? Why not? Even simple books can help students visualize concepts. Even books that might be considered “baby books” can be used in your upper elementary math. There is more than one way to use a book. Come read how we do it.

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Our Favourite Books to Use on Valentine’s Day

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Books are for everyone and even your upper elementary students love to enjoy a great book. These books are themed around Valentine's Day, but they aren't too romantic for school. Check out our list of Valentine's Day books for your upper elementary classroom.

We love to read to our students, but they are in grades four and five, so we try to avoid books about romance when we look for Valentine’s Day books, but sometimes it just sneaks in. Quite often, the books are too young for our students, but when that happens, we encourage our students to read to their younger buddies. Come read through this list of Valentine’s Day books we’ve collected over the years.

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15 Ways to Engage Readers During Your Read-Aloud

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If your administration thinks reading aloud to your students is a waste of time, you need to read this post full of ways to engage readers and teach your language arts outcomes. It goes far beyond listening skills. Come get a whole bunch of ideas on how to get the most out of your read aloud.

It seems that there is less and less time for reading aloud to your students, but if you use that read-aloud to engage your readers, you can teach so many different skills. Kids (and adults) of all ages love to be read to. If that weren’t the case, there wouldn’t be a thriving industry of audiobooks.

Administrators want teachers to focus their time on literacy and numeracy. Things like read-alouds seem like “entertainment,” but there is so much value in reading aloud to children. Come learn how we turn every read-aloud into a lesson (without our students even knowing it).

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Five Novels With Amazing Young Protagonists

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There is nothing better than a good book, but our students have repeatedly loved and reread these novels that feature young protagonists. Come read through our list and learn some of the ways we incorporate reading into our daily routines.

Read-aloud novels are a huge part of our daily literacy routine. We built in fifteen minutes each day where one of us reads from a novel to our students. It is important (even at the higher grades) to model fluency, self-monitoring, and questioning techniques when reading aloud to students. We include these minutes in our weekly Language Arts minutes.

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