Ninja Notes

Let us help you teach like a ninja!

professional development

How to Teach Coding Without Knowing How to Code

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If you don't know how to code, but you are expected to teach coding, we've put together activities you can use without any experience.

It seems that teachers are expected to have a wealth of knowledge about everything under the sun. Even as the world changes, they keep adding the new learning to the old content so that students will benefit.

Coding is a vital skill and there are so many ways it enriches the classroom. However, many teachers feel completely inadequate to teach coding because they have never been taught to code.

That’s ok. Coding isn’t about knowing how to code. It’s about knowing how to problem solve and we already know that’s where teachers excel. Come learn some of the ways you can teach coding without being able to code.

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How to Teach Successful Long Division Strategies

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Do your upper elementary students struggle with long division? We've collected all our best tools for helping students master long division and you can have them all. Come read this post and see how we can help your students feel better about math.

Long division has long been one of the most challenging concepts for students in Grade 4 and Grade 5 to master. There are a few reasons students struggle with long division, so we’ve tried to break down some of the ways we set our students up for success.

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How to Run Your Guided Reading Instruction

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Are you learning to run reading groups in your classroom as part of your reading instruction? Great! Here's what we do during our reading instruction groups in upper elementary.

You’re giving Guided Reading instruction a try. Great! Do you know what you should be doing with your Guided Reading groups and reading instruction? You’re going to teach students to read. But what does that mean?

We teach in upper elementary (usually Grade four or five) which means we have readers in our classroom reading from Grade one through to Grade six. We have English Language Readers, students with learning difficulties, avid readers and all the ones in between. This means we often need to use more than one strategy to teach reading.

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Help! I Don’t Know How to Teach Reading

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Are you being asked to teach reading but you haven't learned how? That's because education programs don't actually teach teachers how to teach reading. This training is usually done on the job, but don't worry. We've got everything you need to get started with guided reading.

Have you been asked to do Guided Reading or teach reading in your classroom, but have absolutely no experience and don’t even know where to start? We’ve been there. Let us share our combined years of experience that took us from beginning teachers to literacy specialists.

This is the beginning of a series that will get you set up to do Guided Reading in your classroom, but honestly, it is a long game. Take the pressure off yourself now because you’ll have to give yourself time to get this whole how to teach reading thing down. We’ve been teaching reading for over fifteen years and there is always room to improve. There are always new things to learn.

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The Reasons Your Classroom Management Isn’t Working and How to Fix It

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Are you struggling with your classroom management? Are you out of ideas? Ditch clip charts and rewards and learn how to manage your classroom with strategies that work. Come read the whole post and find some relief!

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.

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How to Differentiate For Your Students in Less Time

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Learn how to differentiate for your students in less time with these strategies. These are practical ways to take some of the planning off your plate and still provide your students with the supports they need. Come read the whole post.

One of the biggest issues teachers talk about is how much time it takes to differentiate their instruction for the needs of the different learners in their complex classrooms. All teachers want to help, reach and teach all their students, but understanding how to do this can be a challenge especially for teachers who are new to teaching, new to a grade level or new to the types of challenges and barriers a student is facing.

Full Disclosure: Differentiated instruction is hard.

And there seems to be some sort of unwritten out there that everyone should be good at it the first time you try.

Gee, no pressure.

Well, what if we could give you some tried and true strategies that have worked for us? We all know differentiation is important, but what does it mean to truly differentiate for everyone?

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