I’ve decided to switch things up in the classroom for this brand new decade. I hit the ground running with these changes yesterday for the first day back to school. The students should be able to follow the daily visual schedule without any problems. I’ve been told that schedules such as these can really help…

I hope you have been enjoying my Teaching Tip Tuesdays series of posts. Today’s tip – Sometimes You Just Need a Break. Teachers work really hard. We have so much work to do on a daily basis. That’s why it is important to try and do as much work as we can at school so…

Here’s a great tip for helping your students in the computer lab. Go to the surplus store and pick up some cheap USB thumb drives. The above drives only cost me $4.00 a piece. You can’t really beat that. Label the thumb drives and keep them in your classroom. I can’t tell you how many…

Music doesn’t need to be a scary subject to teach. You don’t have to be a musician. You don’t have to be a good singer. You don’t have to have any talent or passion to teach it to your students. This week’s Teaching Tip Tuesday post is for all the reluctant classroom teachers who find…

This is the song map that I created to teach my class the song “Yellow Submarine.” I love using song maps because it teaches that music can be written down and read. This image is read just like you would read any text – from left to right and top to bottom. Here is a…

I send home a newsletter to parents each and every month. This is the homework portion of the newsletter I sent home last week for the month of November. Homework is an important part of your child’s learning. It is expected that Grade 3 students do at least 20 minutes of homework per night. Below,…

It is very important to have an organized record of the marks you assign your students. Marks are a personal matter and should not be written down in your Day Book. That’s why it is important to keep a separate Mark Book. I use a sheet just like this one to record all of the…

I found an efficient way to mark student work a few years ago and I don’t know why I hadn’t thought of it sooner. It is so simple that I almost forgot to share it with you here on Teaching Tip Tuesdays. So here’s my tip, “Level Everything.” I will go over some of the…

Welcome to Teaching Tips. This is an archive page that features all of the teaching tips that have been posted. Please visit this page often as it will be continually updated with each new tip. Below you find the tips in the order they have appeared on the site. If you have any questions, comments,…

This is a picture of my classroom before the students arrived in the morning for the first day of school. I set up mats for each student to sit down on the floor. In front of those mats, I placed a hula-hoop with a name tag, a pencil case, and the first assignment. I instructed…