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Posts for January 2016 


4 Writing Activities for Celebrating Black History Inspire your students to explore black history and culture through writing. Present any of these engaging writing prompts in your middle school or high school classroom during Black History Month or beyond. Each activity requires students to inquire about the people, places, events, and issues that have shaped African-American history.

Writing a Historical Dialogue Ask your students to imagine what a conversation would be like between them and a significant African-American contributor to social studies, science, math, or English. What would they ask? What would they want to know?

Present them with the following lists of famous figures and encourage them to choose a person they don't know much about. Then have them research the figure and create a dialogue (written conversation) between themselves and the person. The dialogue should discuss important experiences in the person’s life and work.



Celebrating Presidents' Day in the Primary Grades Nagel Photography/Shutterstock.com

This Presidents' Day, awaken your students' interest in the past! Help young learners delve into U.S. history by using these exciting activities in your primary classroom.

Presidential Quotes

Start out the month of February with 10 presidential quotes. Put these quotes on display in your classroom and share one a day. You'll be surprised how many have relevancy in your young learners’ lives. On Presidents' Day, have students choose their favorite quote and write what it means to them.



How to Improve Media Literacy On an average day, American teens spend more time consuming media than attending school. That's the shocking conclusion of a 2015 survey: Teens (ages 13–18) spend an average of 9 hours a day using media while tweens (ages 8–12) spend nearly 6 hours a day. What’s more, these estimates exclude time spent using media for school or homework!

So, how can we help students consume media wisely? How can we teach them to analyze media messages, test them for reliability, and search for bias? These three activities equip students with essential media-literacy skills.



3 Wise Ways to Teach Writing The Chinese philosopher Confucius observed that we learn wisdom in three ways:

Confucius’s insights can serve as inspiration for your writing program. Here’s how.



Developing a Growth Mindset We've all heard defeatist self-talk from students:

Of course, such beliefs make learning these subjects all the more difficult.

But sometimes positive self-talk can also be problematic:

What's wrong with such statements? Like the negative self-talk, these statements limit learning because they create a fixed mindset.
