Makerspaces. They seem to be all the buzz, but the concept that drives them isn’t new. For many years, we’ve been focused on directing every moment of our students’ lives. As parents, the lives of children are scheduled to the point they never have a moment to decide for themselves what to do. As teachers, if our students don’t look like they’re working, we worry that someone will think they aren’t learning. So when did we decide as adults that play is a bad thing?
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How to Bring Indigenous Culture into Art Lessons
Incorporating the stories and culture of Indigenous people is important to us. It’s woven throughout our subject areas, but we often look for other places to provide opportunities to bring cultures together. We’ve had several students who share their Cree and Dene cultures with us. Other years we’ve had no one in our classroom with a direct connection to our Indigenous People. We want all of our students to feel connected to the history of our country and the people who were here first. One way we do this is by exploring the works of Indigenous artists in Canada.
[Read more…] about How to Bring Indigenous Culture into Art Lessons7 Fantastic Ways to Create Classroom Community
Have you ever seen those students that just work together in a classroom like a well-oiled machine? Have you ever dreamt of a classroom community full of harmony where students are on track and work together to learn in the best possible environment? It can happen, but building a caring classroom community doesn’t happen by chance.
We work hard teaching our students how to work together, how to care about each other and how to create a strong community of learners. Come read some of the ways we do this in our classroom.
[Read more…] about 7 Fantastic Ways to Create Classroom CommunityHow 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 Teach Successful Long Division Strategies
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.
[Read more…] about How to Teach Successful Long Division StrategiesAre You Accidentally Teaching Helplessness?
Is it possible that your willingness to help your students might actually be hindering their growth? As teachers, we intend to help our students learn as much as possible as we are often measured by our students’ successes, but is our eagerness to help accidentally sabotaging our students? Are you teaching helplessness?
We work with many different professionals as a classroom teacher. We deal with other teachers, interventionists, support staff such as Educational Assistants, speech-language supports and then outside systems such as social workers, occupational therapists and private medical professionals. The goal of all these people is to have students be successful.
But sometimes students need to struggle. When you take away the struggle, you might actually be preventing learning from happening. In fact, you might be reinforcing negative behaviours such as learned helplessness.
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