Ninja Notes

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How to Add Some Drama to Your Classroom

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Add some drama to your classroom to bring your lessons to life. Check out these practical ways to spice up lessons with dramatic flair for your students. Add some drama to your upper elementary classroom with these activities and lessons.

A strange thing happened this year. Our students were so dramatic-and by that we mean we started using drama in the classroom as a way to help teach, review and reinforce our learning in every subject area. The kids loved it-even the shy and quiet ones.

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You Need to Stop Overlooking Health Class!

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When you skip health class, you tell students it's not important. Use these engaging health and wellness lessons to reinstate health and wellness in your classroom.

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?

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Find the Fake News and So Much More

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We need to teach students how to think critically about what they see online. Check out these tips and lessons you can use in your clasroom to help turn your students in to responsible digital citizens. Digital citizenship and online safety should be a priority in every upper elementary classroom.

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.

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How to Connect Social Studies and Art

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One of the ways to teach social studies is to look at the artwork created by different cultures. Geography also lends itself well to art lessons. Come learn about some of the ways we connect social studies and art in our upper elementary classroom.

In Canada, elementary teachers teach all the subject areas in most schools-except specialties like French or music. This means generalist teachers like us are expected to teach art, even when we aren’t trained artists. Our students have been known to question some of our drawings over the years, so we’ve had to be creative in finding projects we can teach our students that help them learn, but don’t stress us out. We want to share ways to connect social studies and art with all of you.

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How to Teach Multiple Perspectives in the Classroom

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How do you teach controversial or challenging issues in your classroom? We try to teach students about multiple perspectives so they can learn to proper research and debate issues that are important to them. This is even more important in the age of fake news. Come check out these activities you can do in your upper elementary classroom to teach students to investigate multiple perspectives.

The Canadian news is flooded with discussions about pipelines and where they should or shouldn’t be built. So, how do we address the multiple perspectives of different issues in the classrooms? It’s important to be impartial while presenting all the facts from both sides of the issue.

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How to Differentiate Using Choices

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Sometimes all students need to feel successful is the chance to make a choice so they feel like they have some control. Come learn how to leverage choices and boost your students' engagement.

How would you feel if you knew you were a wonderful writer but the only way you could express yourself was through modern dance? What would you do if you had to recite your report card comments by memory to each and every parent? How would you feel if you were given the choice to write your report cards any way YOU want? (Ours would be invisible!)

Imagine how different your life would be if you were given the choice to do or say certain things.

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