Boxlight Educator UK

It’s the middle of both Walk to School Week and National Walking Month so clearly walking is essential to maintain physical health as well as to improve focus and concentration once students make it to school. It’s a great time to incorporate simple STEM activities to engage your students in learning and walking.

May is Share-a-Story Month, instituted by the Federation of Children’s Book Groups in 1974, to celebrate the power of storytelling. By encouraging children’s interest in books and reading, this month is a great opportunity to try new ideas to promote the value of story sharing. For example, have you tried facilitating book discussion groups with your class?

Physical activity benefits more than the body’s health; studies have shown that physical activity also improves attention, mood, and reasoning skills. For example, increased activity has shown to improve concentration and sharpen memory. How?

More and more schools are opening up to in-class learning, even as we get closer to the end of the school year. Regardless of if they have two months or two weeks left in the year, the excitement of being in their classrooms with their classmates and teacher can be overwhelming. We celebrate in-person learning and the effort it takes to ensure everyone’s health and safety but after the initial frenzy of first day, first week, first recess, what can be done to get students focused and ready to learn?

With almost a year of considerable use of education technology, including web-enabled devices, large-screen interactive panel displays, video conferencing software, learning management systems, and web cameras, the need to keep students safe is greater. At the beginning of the school year, most schools made sure parents and students signed some type of Acceptable Use Agreement for online learning and digital resources to ensure a safe learning environment. What are general safety reminders and expectations teachers and parents need to make sure of?

April 2 is World Autism Awareness Day, a day that recognises the rights of those with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). What is ASD? It is a developmental disorder that can cause people to behave, communicate, interact, and learn in different ways than most others. As more children are diagnosed with ASD, teachers need to be prepared to teach them using a variety of strategies and tools including educational technology. Read some tips for supporting your students with ASD in the classroom.

World Poetry Day will be celebrated on March 21, 2021 and now is a perfect time to incorporate poetry lessons in your classrooms. Established in 1999 by UNESCO, the purpose of World Poetry Day is to promote poetry reading, writing, and teaching, as well as encourage the relationship between poetry and the other arts such as dance, music, painting, and theater. What are some elements of poetry study to remember? Poems can rhyme, but don’t have to. Poems can be broken into stanzas, which are like paragraphs, or they can be as short as a few syllables per line. There are different types of poems such as ballads, free verse, haikus, limericks, and sonnets. There are poets and poems to research from every century in history, with the earliest poetry believed to predate written language to concrete poems that arrange words into a shape.

The school year is in full swing and depending on how your area has been affected by the ongoing pandemic, that ‘swing’ may feel more like a roller coaster ride! With possible adjustments in learning environments from in-class to remote instruction, teachers should be prepared. This includes classroom management procedures and routines that should be easy to implement and follow. Managing a classroom virtually has its challenges such as lack of teacher’s physical presence for monitoring engagement, and limited view of facial expressions and body language to communicate thoughts and feelings but it is not impossible. At this point in the year, routines have been established to navigate the learning day. How can these procedures be adapted to remote instruction? Review the chart below.

Maths talk is more than simply describing the steps when solving a problem (“First, add the ones, then the tens. If you need to regroup, do that.”). Maths discussions are focused on the process of working towards a solution, understanding how others’ think about that process, and developing a plan for similar problems. Students should be pushed to think beyond an explanation of steps to an explanation of process, including making errors and how those were resolved. They should also be encouraged to use different methods and tools when solving a problem, then sharing these ideas with others to build a bank of strategies. How can engaging in maths talk be done successfully?