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Fire Safety Month
How do you teach fire safety and prevention month? These essential talking points the most important things you must cover. Click to learn more and to download a free firefighter helmet!
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Why Your Bulletin Boards Should Be Filled With Student Work
Take a look around your classroom. What percentage of the walls are covered by store-bought posters or things that you have created and what percentage of the walls or wall space available is covered with student work? When teachers decorate their classrooms with pretty store-bought artifacts it says a lot about what they think about their classroom, about their classroom theme, and a lot about what they like, but it doesn’t really say anything about the students. In recent years classroom bulletin boards have become less and less about sharing student work and more an expression of the teacher. Inspirational words, angel wings, quotes and cricut designs all look very…
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Teaching Composing and Decomposing Numbers to Kindergarten
Use these fun free downloads and popcorn to introduce your kindergarteners to decomposing numbers. Includes a recording sheet - learn more!
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Place Value for Grades 1 and 2
Place value doesn't have to be boring. Understanding that tens and hundreds can be thought of as 'bundles' in base ten, that digits represent the amounts of hundreds, tens and ones, and that those digits are a simplified way of writing the expanded form of numbers does sound quite dry! And yet many of us have to begin the year by reviewing place value - after all it is the bedrock of the number system.
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Staying Focused on Workdays
Going back to school, even when we are at our most enthusiastic, can be tough after a long vacation. Especially when we have a list of tasks we have to complete. And when we haven’t seen our co-workers all summer and we need to catch up. And when our administrators and districts give us professional development classes when we just want to put up the alphabet posters in our room. It can be overwhelming when you enter your classroom on that first workday with chairs stacked against the wall and empty bulletin boards begging for life. Here are three tips to keep you at your most productive and to respect…
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Using Nursery Rhymes at Home and in the Classroom
Listening and speaking are the foundation for reading and writing, and as teachers we know the importance of reading to children from a very young age. But just as important is hearing and learning nursery rhymes. Back in the day I learnt all my nursery rhymes bouncing around on relative's knees, and would proudly show of my ability to 'read' my nursery rhyme book back to front, reciting all the nursery rhymes that are still emblazoned on my memory to this day.
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More Than a Test Score
It's testing season here, and to me that only means one thing. Stress. Stress for our teachers. Our principals. Our parents. But most of all, stress for our students.
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We’ve Got The Whole World In Our Hands
Earth Day is April 22nd and it is a great opportunity for upper elementary students to evaluate the impact that we have on the planet and what the future implications of that impact could be. When I was looking for videos I found a lot of smaltzy, sing-songy videos aimed at lower elementary about recyling, reducing, reusing, planting, etc. But in this blog I want to highlight the five that I found for upper elementary students that I think are the most useful for explaining and laying out the consequences of not looking after our planet, as well as things families can do that could have a positive effect. (Disclosure:…
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Fractured Fairy Tales
Teaching a unit on fairy Tales, folktales and fables was always one of my favorite times in school. We would start with traditional tales, which even back in the 1990’s not everyone knew, and if they did it was often just an wide-eyed Disney version. Then we would move on to lesser known tales, like that of Bluebeard, who told his wife never to open the room on the top floor of the house (but left her the key anyway), Rushen-Coatie and Yeh-Shen (Scottish and Chinese versions of Cinderella, respectively). By far my favorite part of the unit though, was teaching ‘twisted’ or ‘fractured’ versions of familiar fairy tales, usually…
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Mother’s Day Craft
(Disclosure: Some of links below are affiliate links, which means that at no additional cost to you, I will earn a commission if you click through and make a purchase.) As I write this, I know it’s not May, but I want to help you strike something off your list that will creep up on you in a couple of months: Do you find yourself frantically pulling out your hair when you realize that it is Mother’s Day and your students haven’t grown a plant, written on a shrinky dink or made a bracelet/magnet/picture frame for their moms? Before you reach for the yarn and the every trusty box of…
