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How to Celebrate Halloween In the Classroom

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Are you looking for ways to celebrate Halloween in your upper elementary classroom? We gathered up some of our students' favourite activities for you to try. Come take a look!

Halloween is such a special time for many students. In past years, we’ve had parades and assemblies and handed out candy. There was a time when bobbing for apples was a good idea. Now, since the pandemic, the thought of countless students scrambling to bite into an apple floating around in a tub full of mouth germs…ugg.

Our classroom is usually bustling with parent volunteers who help out at different Halloween-themed stations. Still, some years, there might not be as many parent volunteers available as you need, so it’s nice to have easy alternatives in your back pocket.

If your school and students are celebrating Halloween, here are some generally easy ways to have a little fun.

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How to Set Up Your Reading Comprehension Schedule

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If you use our weekly reading comprehension sets (or maybe you want to learn more), come see how we schedule the first month and get some ideas for how you can use these reading and grammar activities in your classroom whether your instruction happens in the classroom or online.

If you are struggling with reading instruction in your classroom, you’re not alone. Upper elementary teachers are often not trained in how to teach students to read, despite the fact all the students in their classroom are unlikely to be reading at grade level. Setting up a reading comprehension schedule is one way to get on track.

We designed our Weekly Reading Comprehension Skills specifically for our students. We needed reading material for science and social studies that were at the right reading level and needed to teach grammar and reading skills. You might want to read this post about how we came up with them: Add Great Content to Your Literacy Lessons.

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Add Great Content to Your Literacy Lessons

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There are so many things to teach and just not enough time for it all. We started using content from science and social studies to teach grammar and reading comprehension. Game changer! Come find out what we did and how we did it in our upper elementary classroom literacy lessons (even during distance teaching).

It took fifteen years of teaching and professional development before we felt confident teaching reading to students in upper elementary. Reading is one of the most important skills any teacher is responsible for, but it is often taught by stabbing at strategies until something works-only to find it doesn’t work for the next student. Literacy lessons were hard to design and we didn’t really know where to start.

The most important thing we’ve learned is that reading comprehension skills are also skills related to grammar, word parts, word families and patterns, and writing. The same skills are used in a variety of ways.

If a student missed one of these skills, they trip over it in everything other subject. By the time students get to the end of Grade Three, if they aren’t reading at grade level, they are statistically unlikely to catch up. So, what is a teacher to do?

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The Secrets of Social Emotional Learning for Kids

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Do your students have difficulty regulating their emotions? Do you need strategies to help teach students about feelings and how to calm down? This is the post for you. Come read the whole post and get practical strategies you can implement today.

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.

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Easy to Use Classroom Activities for Earth Day

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Are you looking for activities to do with your upper elementary class? We pulled together Earth Day themed lessons and activities (but they can be used any time of year) for your upper elementary classroom. Come check out the resources, books, and ideas to use right away.

Every day in our classroom is Earth Day. It’s part of our science lessons to learn about energy conservation, so it’s easy to make sure we talk about the importance of conservation regularly.

One year a fellow teacher thought it would be a great idea to print a little paper globe for each student in our school (that’s several hundred) and write a “thank you to the Earth” type sentence.

I don’t often speak up at meetings, but I couldn’t resist this one. Isn’t it counterproductive to teach students about conservation by wasting all that paper?

Everyone agreed, but NO ONE had any suggestions on what we could do instead. And that’s how we came up with this list of Earth Day activities (and why you should try some of them).

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It’s Time to Get Your Emergency Sub Plans Ready

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Are you prepared for a substitute teacher in the event you have to leave your classroom unexpectedly? Get these tips and some templates to make your planning simpler, faster and FINISHED!

Writing emergency sub plans for a supply teacher is a big pain in the butt. Even more so, when some sort of family emergency comes up and you’re still legally responsible for two days of classes (or more depending on where you teach).

It’s strange that these certified teachers who come into our classroom don’t have to plan anything for two full days. At least, that is the rule in the province where we live. Teachers are responsible for leaving two full days of plans for their students regardless of the situation. This must be in the only job in the world where you do just as much work on the days you aren’t there as on the days you are.

I once wrote sub plans on my phone from a hospital bed. True story. And as crazy as that was, I learned a valuable lesson from it.

Emergency Sub Plans!

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