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Unravel the Magic of Fractured Fairy Tale Activities!

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How are you using fairy tales in the classroom? One of our favourite ways is to use fractured fairy tales to help students write their own stores. There are already so many great examples out there. Come read through this list of ideas you can use right away in your upper elementary classroom. Add some magic to your language arts lessons.

Once upon a time, there was a teacher who discovered her students didn’t know the story of Little Red Riding Hood. Yes! It’s a true story. It is not a fairy tale. With each year, it is surprising that fewer and fewer students know the traditional fairy tales. It seems that reading classic stories before entering school has become less and less common at home. With the huge selection of stories, teachers just don’t have time to read them all.

Even in upper elementary, one of our favourite units is fairy tales. We start our fairy tale unit by reading some of the old classics. If you have older students who are a little twisty, you can even share the darker versions. We talk about why fairy tales were used by parents and how the stories have changed over time. Come learn about how we use fairy tales in our upper elementary classroom.

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Rich Financial Literacy Lessons to Save For Your Students

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Financial literacy is so much more than counting money, but things change regularly so it can be difficult to keep up. We put together all the information teachers need to add these lessons to their upper elementary classroom. Talk about saving, investing, budgeting and so much more with these activities and all the the background information needed for teachers.

Gone are the days when parents would teach their kids how to use their money. In fact, many adults don’t know how to use their own money. According to a recent poll in Canada, seven of ten adults consider themselves financially literate. However, nearly 65% of Canadians admit to being in debt or living from one paycheck to another. So, what does it really mean to be financially literate, and what does this have to do with elementary education?

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5 Amazing Canadian Women Your Students Should Know About

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You don't have to wait for Women's History Month to learn about amazing Canadian women. There are so many creative, intelligent and trailblazing women in the world. I think many people don't realize how many fascinating women we have in our own country. Come learn about these women that you can add to your lessons any time of year.

You don’t have to wait for Women’s History Month to learn about amazing Canadian women. There are so many creative, intelligent and trailblazing women in the world. I think many people don’t realize how many fascinating women we have in our own country. Come learn about these women that you can add to your lessons any time of year.

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How to Have Snow Much Fun With These Snow Activities

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A drawing of a snowman with pastels.

When you live in a winter climate like northern Canada, the opportunities to do activities related to snow are endless. We try to build weather-related snow activities into our classes wherever possible. We teach in upper elementary, but we’ve used some of these activities with our younger buddies and some we’ve challenged ourselves. Come check out these snow activities that will keep you busy all winter.

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Recycle Old Art Projects 9 Fantastic Ways

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What do you do with old art projects that aren't really framing-worthy? There are lots of ways you can recycle and repurpose art in your classroom. This is a great way to get rid of practice work or those projects that just don't work out. Come read through these ideas and see what you can do in your upper elementary classroom today.

If you have a bunch of completed art projects or partially completed ones, we came up with a whole bunch of ways to recycle them into new things. Recycling art projects not only helps reduce waste but also encourages creativity and resourcefulness.

Before we recycle any piece of art, we encourage students to take a picture so it can be remembered but won’t take up space. This is so that students can see how they grow and change as artists as opposed to keeping it as a memory.

We hate wasting materials, so whenever possible, we recycle pieces of art projects and craft materials so they can be used again in the future. The last thing we want is for art projects to be thrown into the landfill. Sometimes we do art projects that are not meant for display because we are practicing skills. These are the ones we recycle first.

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Foster Environmental Stewardship in the Classroom

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Teaching students about environmental stewardship comes easily in most science classes, but there are lots of other ways to encourage being a responsible citiizen throughout your day in your upper elementary classroom. Come learn some of the ways we teach students to take care of the planet on a daily basis.

Climate change is a real concern for most young people these days. We have used environmental stewardship lessons as part of our overall science lessons, but there are lots of things that you can do in the classroom to help foster a love of caring for our planet. Little changes can make a big difference over time. Environmental stewardship is more than just taking care of the planet. It is about being a responsible citizen and thinking about how we impact the world. Come learn about how we integrate these lessons directly into the classroom.

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Amazing Measurement Activities to Stretch Math

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Are you looking for measurement activities to spice up your math lessons? We collected all our favourite ideas for our upper elementary classroom and put it all together for you. Come have a read and get your math class class planned in minutes.

Measurement is one of those math strands that requires lots of hands-on activities and practice. While students can learn about the different measurements and units through learning about them, it essentially takes a lot of practice measuring to really understand how all the measurements work together.

We have found that a combination of book learning and reference materials supports students while they use units to measure different items. Read on to learn about some of the different measurement activities we use to help students master the metric system (and other units of measurement).

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15 Simple Machines Activities that Will Hook Your Students

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If you are teaching simple machines in your science class, you need to read this post full of ideas.

Simple machines are basic tools that make work easier by changing the size or direction of a force. Here is our list of the six simple machines, with an everyday example of each: the lever (seesaw), pulley (flagpole), wheel and axle (bicycle), inclined plane (ramp), wedge (axe), and screw (jar lid).

One of our favourite science units to teach is about simple machines or wheels and levers (if you teach in Alberta). We love it because it provides many opportunities for hands-on learning and can be done inside regardless of the weather. Students love to build contraptions, and we can use up materials that would generally go in the recycling bin, so it’s also a very low-cost science unit. Which of these activities have you tried during your science lessons?

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Spring Classroom Activities To Make You Bloom

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Spring is here and we have collected our favourite spring classroom activities to help you get through spring fever. Come read our list a get some ideas you can use right away.

Spring is a great time in upper elementary classrooms. By this point in the school year, students understand the routines and things tend to start running smoothly. Of course, there is also the spring fever that tends to creep in and make students a little squirrely as the weather changes. Nothing says spring like the smell of damp socks and slushy halls after recess breaks.

We put together some of our favourite spring classroom activities that we use to keep students learning and moving forward. Come see which of these would work in your upper elementary classroom.

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Are You Missing Out on the Love of Drama Circles?

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Are you missing out on the benefits of using drama circles in your upper elementary classroom? Come learn how to use them to help with listening skills, reading abilities and for the fun of it.

Before learning about drama circles, we weren’t sure how we could incorporate drama into our classroom in a meaningful way that didn’t take away from all the work we needed to do. Putting on a play just didn’t seem like a good use of our learning time, but we knew our students enjoyed acting. That is when we considered some of the benefits of drama circles in our upper elementary classroom.

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How to Bring Indigenous Culture into Art Lessons

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Include Indigenous artists from across Canada in your 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.

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How to Use Logic Puzzles in the Classroom

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Logic puzzles are good for your brain. They encourage reading for information, tracking and critical thinking. Come learn how we use logic puzzles in our upper elementary classroom.

Logic puzzles are a series of written clues that readers use to fill in a chart. The chart shows which items match each other. These types of puzzles have been a life-long favourite and come in a variety of levels of difficulty. We created puzzles for our students to solve for fun, but have also looked at how solving logic puzzles helps students become better readers. Read on to learn the ways you can use logic puzzles in your classroom to help teach reading.

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