Happy New Year! Chances are you are on the lookout for indoor-friendly ideas for your students/children. Included in this post are three fun, tested and approved activities and experiments to extend learning at home or in the classroom this winter.
1. Rube Goldberg Machines
As I sat down to write this month’s article, I didn’t know where to begin, so I searched our blog archives for what I wrote in December of 2019 (when our world seemed more normal)… National Handwashing Awareness Week, National Pearl Harbor Day of Remembrance, and the winter solstice...
The Presidential Election, Veteran’s Day, and Thanksgiving
It has been quite a year, and November is another eventful month. November 3 is the big day – the 2020 presidential election. Chances are, talk about the election and the candidates has spilled into your classroom. Below are some resources to help provide structure and guidance with engaging your students in electi...
What is knowledge and how is it changing?
In school I perceived knowledge as a growing but finite volume. Standards had been set for each subject and a list of skills was assigned to be honed to at least a minimum competency. Literacy, history, math, science and art branched into more specialized subsets as I progressed upward through grade levels. As a college g...
October is ADHD Awareness Month. Although Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder, or ADHD, presents a spectrum of challenges, there are also numerous positive traits associated with ADHD to be aware of this month and beyond. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), millions of children in the United States have b...
I get tired of having conversations about masks. I got a cool one with the Chicago Cubs emblem that fills me with pride, I wear it everywhere and I feel responsible about it. But the discussion is stale. It's as riveting as a weather review in mid-August or late February. I want to talk about something interesting. My suspicion is that all you teachers are exhausted planning and thinki...
Resource Roundup for the Virtual Classroom
Normally I would be writing about activities and resources to incorporate into your teaching practices about Labor Day, 9/11, the first day of fall, and/or other significant events associated with September (as I did l in this blog pos...
Ok folks, here we are. I haven't taken the time to verify every state and district, but for the most part you can expect to begin the 2020-2021 school year teaching partially or fully online. Let's have a round of grumbles and then get down to planning. To be fair there probably is a faction that prefers this delivery model, and there is likely another faction that's more astute tea...
First as a student, then as a teacher, and now as a parent, I have experienced some level of “August anxiety” every year as summer winds down and a new school year begins. (In this blog post from our 2018 archives, I interviewed a veteran school psychol...
Can you remember the last time we patted ourselves on the back as a country? Not something like "Hooray, an American won the Nathan's Hot Dog Eating Contest" (he ate 75 hot dogs and buns in 10 minutes last Saturday, ugghh), but when was the last time media, mainstream or social, reported that most Americans are happy and collectively pleased with our status, or the same data for t...