Let us help you teach like a ninja!
We believe firmly in social-emotional learning (or SEL), self-regulation and teaching students about feelings. Students today struggle with identifying feelings, managing their emotions and staying focused.
Let’s not get into all the causes of why some students are unable to describe and manage their feelings, but more and more instructional time becomes wasted unless we intentionally teach students about to self-regulate.
[Read more…] about The Secrets of Social Emotional Learning for Kids
Recently I was having a discussion with a former student teacher. She had reached out because her last school year felt like a disaster and she was wondering how could improve. She’d tried clip charts, behaviour charts, communication journals, reward baskets and everything else she could think of, but nothing worked. She wanted to know how she could improve her classroom management because she feared she couldn’t last another year. She asked about my secret because she didn’t remember what I did.
Was it that uneventful that she didn’t know what I did? No. Not quite.
[Read more…] about The Reasons Your Classroom Management Isn’t Working and How to Fix It
Are you having trouble fitting health lessons into your plans because you already have too much to teach? Stop overlooking the value of health class! You can leverage health lessons to teach reading and writing. You can help students in your class be organized, play safely and get along with each other. So why are you ignoring all these important outcomes?
[Read more…] about You Need to Stop Overlooking Health Class!
We realized the importance of teaching critical thinking and fact-checking one day on Facebook. One ninja-mother-in-law posted an article about an actor that had died-but the actor had died FIVE years earlier. Yet, there she was just reposting like crazy. A dog with a piece of ham on its face was her next post and that was when we started writing our digital citizenship and online safety resource. Clearly, digital citizenship is a skill to be learned by many these days.
[Read more…] about Find the Fake News and So Much More
Do you have to repeat yourself constantly because your students just don’t know how to listen? Maybe it’s not them. Are your directions unclear? Do you have their attention? Maybe your instructions were unclear. Nobody likes a yelly teacher. So here is how you can fix your directions and improve their listening skills at the same time.
[Read more…] about How to Make Students Listen Without Yelling
What does it mean to self-regulate? Well, the obvious answer means for students to keep their feelings in check. But that’s a bit misleading. It implies that students need to squish down their feelings. Emotional regulation is a skill that students need to be taught. It does not come naturally for everyone.
Students who are having a hard time with self-regulation often appear to be disengaged, rude, helpless or otherwise frustrating for teachers. For many teachers, this means ramping up the WOW factor to try to entice students into wanting to learn. This might mean costumes, balloons, candy and confetti for math-but imagine if it could be something so much simpler?
[Read more…] about How to Teach Students to Self-Regulate
