Ninja Notes

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Growth Mindset

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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How to Teach Students to Analyze Errors in Math

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When students understand how they make mistakes while calculating math equations, they can begin to prevent making them. We teach our students to analyze errors in math. Come see how we use this strategy to help students deepen their math understanding and grab a free activity you can use in your upper elementary math class. We use this activity with our grade four and grade five math students and all of them benefit from it.

Over the years, we’ve had students that don’t want to correct their math errors. Why do students need to know how they made a mistake? For students, it helps them understand where they went wrong so they don’t repeat the errors. For teachers, it helps narrow down how to support or teach the student. But how do you teach students to analyze errors in math?

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How to Create Back to School Power Words

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Try this quick activity that will last all year. We use power words instead of making goals. We talk about growth mindset and words that help us be our best. Then we make a display to share our words. This makes a great back to school activity or works perfect in the New Year. Come take a look!

Do your students write goals? It can be an effective way to have students learn to take responsibility for their behaviour or learning. We tried something new this year. Students chose power words instead of goals.

Back to school is a great time to reflect on past years in school. It’s the right time to think about the positive changes you and your students can make. This will help you all have a wonderful year together.

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Use the Learning Pit to Teach Growth Mindset

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Do your students struggle with giving up as soon as the work gets challenging? Do they lack determination or grit? This is one of the best lessons we ever learned and we regularly use it with our students to show them how to embrace a growth mindset. Come learn about the learning pit.

Have you been learning about growth mindset and wanting to try to instill some determination in your students? Have you heard of the learning pit? It might be the key to teaching students to learn how to learn.

Do you have students that break down during tasks that require a bit of problem-solving? Are they frustrated? Do they yell and scream or run out of the classroom? You need the learning pit.

Teaching students to overcome challenges can be difficult when we live in a society that is all about getting things done quickly. We have technology, parents and constant distractions constantly telling students they can learn anything anytime with little or no effort. As a teacher, this is very challenging when students feel they’ve failed, get frustrated or give up right away.

This was what was happening in our classroom. Students who could manage challenges were more successful overall because they kept working until they got it. It felt like it was a lack of effort, but it was much more than that. So we started investigating and researching best practices to help us teach students to become comfortable with being uncomfortable.

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