Brain Ninjas

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Seasonal

How to Make Valentine’s Day Love Trees

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Create these adorable watercolour love trees for Valentine's Day, World Kindness Day, Earth Day or Pink Shirt Day. They make a great bulletin board and our post features step by step instructions for your elementary classroom. Come read the whole post.

Do you need a Valentine’s Day art project or activity that you can use to teach students about colour while making something special? Do you dread having to find something to do for Valentine’s Day? Are you a Valentine’s Day fool? Or Scrooge? It sounds like you need to learn how to make Valentine’s Day love trees!

There are several variations to make this Valentine’s Day-themed project listed below, but basically, it’s a tree with heart-shaped leaves. Sounds great, right? Who doesn’t need a heart-shaped leaf? So cute and easy to make! They are perfect for World Kindness Day or Pink Shirt Day too!

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Five Easy Christmas Tree Projects for Leftover Bits and Pieces

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Do you have lots of odds and ends leftover from various Christmas art porjects and crafts over the years? Here are five projects to help use them up. Come find the free art project instructions and get some new ideas for your upper elementary students. These make great gifts or decorations during the festive season.
Rolled Christmas Wrapping Paper

If you’re like us (and most teachers), you likely have lots of bits and pieces left over from previous projects. We often have to buy a class set of things and always have one or two left over. The good news is that we have some projects that can use some of that up and still create awesome Christmas tree projects for your art class. Have your students gift them to their families. Come check out these Christmas tree projects.

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The Best Scary Halloween Books for Your Classroom Library

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A skull looks over a pile of books. 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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10 Ways to Save Money in Your Classroom After Christmas

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There are lots of deals you can get for your classroom after Christmas if you're organized and know what to look for. Come read about some fo the things we try to find after the holidays and the way we use them.

Phew! You made it! Christmas is over, but remember how crazy and busy it was? We always get prepared one year in advance. Are we crazy? No, just thrifty. There are lots of benefits to planning out a year ahead. It means you can find lots of deals after Christmas that you can use for the classroom.

While some of these items are used for Christmas in the classroom, most can and should be used all year round.

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Christmas Books We Love

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Are you looking for Christmas books to share with your students this holiday season? Check out our list of books that will get everyone in the spirit of the holiday season.

There are so many amazing books that use Christmas as a theme that you could read one a day and probably not run out in your lifetime. Christmas picture books make great gifts and they can be read all year round.

Now, we recognize that not all of your students will be celebrating Christmas (and we have lots of book lists for other holidays and celebrations-see the bottom), but for your students that do, we’ve collected a list of our favourite pictures books, graphic novels and novels that bring on the Christmas spirit.

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How to Create Wooden Ornaments for Christmas

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Create these adorable wooden Christmas ornaments using recycled game pieces and a little paint. Step by step instructions and design ideas are included

Have you ever seen something in a store and thought, “I can make that for way less money?” Maybe. Or, have you ever thought, “Wouldn’t it just be easier for me to buy it instead of making it?” That’s how we’ve usually felt looking for wooden ornaments for Christmas.

We accidentally made these little Christmas ornaments and they turned out so cute that we knew we had to write about them so others could make their own. This project started completely by accident, but sometimes, the happiest of accidents turn out to be blessings in disguise. So, this is our path to making some wooden ornaments from recycled game pieces, but you can take a few shortcuts with our lesson below.

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How to Make Christmas Wreaths With Recycled Materials

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This simple lesson can be done by anyone using recycled fabric. It makes a great Christmas gift from your students to their parents. Come read through all the instructions and make one for yourself and check out some of our other Christmas crafts.

Here is a great activity your students can do that is both environmentally friendly and makes a wonderful Christmas gift. If you plan on using this as a Christmas gift from your students to their families, you’re going to want to start collecting the materials a few months in advance so that you have enough pieces.

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How to Create Recycled Paper Ornaments

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Use up all that paper laying around your classroom and make some great ornaments that make great gifts! These make great Christmas or Earth Day crafts.

Here’s a little task you can give to your students to make an environmentally friendly Christmas tree ornament. Using recycled paper products is good for the environment, especially if parents keep the ornaments that are created for generations. It’s especially great if you have lots of extra paper lying around. Rescue it from the recycling bin and use it to make the holidays a little brighter.

This is a great task to put into your makerspace for the month of December, but you can make these any time of year if your paper isn’t seasonal.

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Your Big List of Must Have Books for Ramadan and Eid

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If you are looking for books about Ramadan and Eid to use in your upper elementary classroom, check out this list put together by our school community.

Reading is a huge part of our classroom, and it’s important to us to make sure the books and characters reflect all aspects of the lives of our students. That includes books about and including different faiths, backgrounds and cultural beliefs.

Ramadan is an important part of our classroom culture, so we searched high and low to find books that our students could use to learn from and reflect on. Here are some of the titles we found and thought you should check out yourself.

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How to Acknowledge Ramadan and Eid With Your Students

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If you are looking to acknowledge Ramadan and Eid with your students, come check out these activities you can use in your upper elementary classroom.

In our classroom, we celebrate everything. This year we learned about Ramadan with some of our Muslim students and celebrated Eid with a few different activities.

We think it’s important for all of our students to feel included. It doesn’t matter which different celebrations, observances or holidays they observe. Students share their customs and traditions with us. We celebrated Lunar New Year, Ukrainian Christmas, World Hijab Day, Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas, and now we’re getting ready for Ramadan and Eid.

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Gift Festive Christmas Classroom Activities to Your Students

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Do you need some Christmas classroom activities to keep your students busy during December that are still valuable learning opportunities? Look no further than this list of easy to implement (and barely prep) ideas. Come check out some Christmas math or design a social media account for an elf. These Christmas activities are perfect for your upper elementary classroom.

You know that week in December when you’re constantly called down to the auditorium for concert rehearsals, some of your students are away sick, some have left for vacation early, and you have to keep a classroom full of excited kids busy? Do you need some Christmas classroom activities to solve the problem?

Christmas is fun and all, but it’s so hard to keep kids interested in learning, and it’s a challenging time to introduce new concepts with all those interruptions. What’s a teacher to do?

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How to Make Recycled Can Characters

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Upcycle cans from your house into these adorable can characters. It's great as a Christmas craft or a language arts character study.

Here’s a great reason to eat potato chips (you don’t have to eat them, but it’s a good excuse). Have your students collect Pringles cans or any other metal or cardboard can that has a plastic lid and upcycle them into a great holiday activity. Our students have loved making recycled can characters over the years.

This activity will work with other types of cans that are made of cardboard with a metal base and plastic lid.

We made our cans into snowmen, gingerbread men, penguins, Santas, elves and reindeer as a fun Christmas craft activity that parents will cherish for years to come.

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