Group items tagged

"In the age of technology, when students use online databases for home research and when Khan Academy tutorials personalize learning, why does the 21st-century student come to school? They come to see their friends. They come for the community. They come to be part of a classroom culture that motivates them to stick with the online tutorial and write that last paragraph in an essay. For my first seven years of teaching, I spent the first week discussing class norms, dutifully posting group expectations on the wall, and asking that students sign an agreement to follow them in an effort to "determine class culture." Turns out there's a quicker, more fun way to establish a positive atmosphere. With a little reinforcement, this positive culture lasts past the honeymoon of the first two weeks and into the second quarter when the gloves come off. The secret is improv games. I call them warm-ups and play them once a week at the beginning of class. Many students tell me that warm-ups are the best part of their day."

Thirty-Six Weeks of Language Arts Warm Ups - questions to begin the school day

"We know Santa's elves aren't the only ones busy this December. For teachers making lessons plans and checking them twice, we've got you covered. Our free educational games are great for K-12 classroom warm-ups, extension activities, and writing prompts." Includes activities for Geography, Computer Science, Language and Social Studies!!

"How about creating some awesome graphic quotes to use in your classroom? These could be used either as warm-up activities or entry events to project based learning. Picture quotes could also serve as prompts to brainstorm ideas around a given topic or as educational posters to embellish your classroom walls with nuggets of wisdom. I have some searching and found this wonderful list from Louise Myers, check them out below."

"Phrases like "random acts of kindness" and "pay it forward" have become popular terms in modern society. Perhaps this could be best explained by those who have identified a deficiency in their lives that can only be fulfilled by altruism. It seems that we just can't get enough of those addictive, feel-good emotions -- and with good reason. Scientific studies prove that kindness has many physical, emotional, and mental health benefits. And children need a healthy dose of the warm-and-fuzzies to thrive as healthy, happy, well-rounded individuals. Patty O'Grady, PhD, an expert in neuroscience, emotional learning, and positive psychology, specializes in education. She reports: Kindness changes the brain by the experience of kindness. Children and adolescents do not learn kindness by only thinking about it and talking about it. Kindness is best learned by feeling it so that they can reproduce it. A great number of benefits have been reported to support teaching kindness in schools, best summed up by the following."

"Those of you who live and teach in northern climes know what winter is all about. It's not about the beauty of the fluffy white stuff or the bone-chilling temperatures or even the short sunlight hours each day. In a primary classroom, it is really all about the snow clothes. Assuming that the temperature is warm enough to actually go outside (in my school division the children go outside unless the temperature-including wind chill-is below -28C), the whole putting on/taking off all those snow clothes takes up a LOT of time. For some students, it is a ten-minute process. And when you consider that it has to be done first thing in the morning, before and after two recesses, at lunch time and again at the end of the day…well, you can see a lot of time needs to go into this every day."

"Analogies are one of the best kept secrets in education. Often used as multiple choice question items or as warm-ups to begin a lesson, analogies are use teaching and learning strategies because of their flexibility, ease of use, and tendency to force cognitive load on students. I use them constantly in my classroom, primarily due to their grab-and-go format. Any place, any time-verbal, drawing, exit slip, discussion, one-on-one, whole class, group work, begin class, end class, abstract or concrete thinking, analogies are imminently useful. They're also everywhere-debates, commercials, sitcoms, poetry, hip-hop, video games. What's not to love?"

"This year we celebrated an Hour of Code (other posts from previous years can be found here and here)with an Interhouse Robotics Competition. Our Coding & Robotics Leader introduced the event and asked all the girls to dance to Code.org Dance Party Challenge as a warm up!"