strategies

Empowering Financial Literacy: Tools and Strategies for Every Classroom

Every April is Financial Literacy Month, raising awareness of how important it is to achieve financial literacy and maintain smart money management habits. Learning this early can really ignite today’s generation into future financial savvy adults.   EVERFI One of my favorite go-to places for financial literacy is Everfi.com. Everfi is not only free for teachers and K-12 students, but they also offer professional learning resources for teachers and will meet with you one-on-one on how Everfi can best fit into your classroom. In Elkhart, we have Everfi rostered through Clever, so signing in is a breeze. I especially like the...

Spotlight on Strategies: High Impact Teaching Strategies to Support All Learners

Finding new and creative ways to engage students can be challenging. We know that it is best practice to use multimedia content in the classroom, which helps the teacher engage the students and in turn helps the student to be more involved and retain more information from the lesson. Sometimes finding those resources and strategies, however, can be difficult.   Subscribers to Discovery Education have access to an extensive collection of multimedia resources, as well as a collection of creative, research-based instructional strategies, known as Spotlight on Strategies (SOS).  These strategies are presented by teachers for teachers to support implementing multimedia...

Create Seesaw Sorting Activities

Interested in learning how teachers create sorting activities on Seesaw? Watch the video or follow the written directions below to learn how! Create a Background in Slides Google Slides is a great place to create backgrounds for Seesaw activities. It allows for more customization and editing options than creating the background in Seesaw, itself. It also helps by creating less items for students to manipulate or potentially edit on their Seesaw activity page. When creating a background in google slides, you can change the background color, add text boxes, utilize tables, and much more! When finished, you’ll want to download...

Visual Note Taking: Sketchnotes 101

What are sketchnotes? Sketchnoting is the strategy of mashing together the use of visuals along with words to help aid in student comprehension. They serve not only as an alternative to writing traditional notes, but also as a creative learning assignments with outcomes that are more personal and can act as a really great tool to reflect on the learning that is taking place.  What’s nice about sketchnoting is that it is not a strict format. Instead, it presents students with a variety of tools for them to choose from and create their own customized note-taking process, one that works...

Engaging Assessment Strategies That Don’t Need Screens

We all understand that we need to use our devices to conduct a lot of the instruction and assessments during this crisis learning situation. We also need to be considerate of the amount of time that we are asking students to work on screens. We cannot sacrifice good teaching strategies like movement, collaboration, critical thinking, and engineering while we’re away from buildings. The following activities are here to bring some creativity to your assessments. 3 Card Matching Game After assigning a list of vocabulary words for students to learn, have them create one card for each vocabulary word, one description card for...