Teaching Tips
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Novel in an Hour
I went to a workshop last week and we did an activity called “Novel in an Hour” The class was divided into small groups and each group was given a chapter or two of a novel. We weren’t told the title or what the story was about. We were just given a photocopy of our…
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A Day Plan Template to Use for Your Lessons
This is what my day plan looks like for today. I always write my lesson plans in a format that will allow anyone to come in and teach my lessons if need be. You can see that my rotary classes have a name and a room number written right on the template. The coolest thing…
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The Last Ten Minutes of a Lesson are Very Important
How to Teach: The Book of Plenary by Phil Beadle I’ve read dozens of books on teaching and most of them are fairly straight-forward. It’s hard to describe, but this one is written with a sarcastic, witty, dark kind of tone. It sets it apart from other educational books, that’s for sure. The author admits…
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A Great School Doesn’t Need a Building
A great school doesn’t need a building. It just needs students eager to learn, dedicated teachers, and a little help from the community. I saw this on Tumblr and was completely blown away by what these teachers have created. They built a school under a bridge in India. It is an unusual school in an…
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Create Visual Poems With Your Students
Here are a few visual poems. Can you read them? 1. Follow the map. 2. Connect the dots. The first one is a map, of sorts. You have to follow the arrows to read the phrase . . . “You can’t get lost if you don’t know where you’re going.” I like that visual image…
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8 Tips for Young Musicians
Here are 8 tips you can use in your music classroom. I hope they will inspire the young musicians in your class. I think using the term “young musician” is very important too. Some students won’t see themselves as musicians whatsoever. They won’t feel comfortable playing an instrument at first. They might stop trying. That’s…
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A Free Method Book For Beginning Music Classes
When I first started teaching music, I used the resources that were on hand at my school. The method book we had was Standard of Excellence and I wasn’t really happy with it. Almost all of the pieces used the same five notes, were in the same key, and it was rare that new music…
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A Warm Up That Pays Off
I normally have some kind of class warm-up, whether it be a line of music, the Bb Scale, or playing a pattern that I write on the board. So today, when I asked my students to play this pattern on the third note of their Bb Scale, they didn’t bat an eye. I then had…
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Please, No More Indoor Recess
Our school has a tradition of going to the downtown Cenotaph for the Remembrance Day ceremonies every year. It was lightly raining and a little bit chilly last week, but we didn’t let that stand in our way. The entire student body still attended the service. We got there about ten minutes early and all-in-all…
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Effective Question Techniques Teachers Should Use
Classroom Management: A Thinking & Caring Approach by Barrie Bennett and Peter Smilanich This is a typical question that teachers often ask the class, “Who can tell me the difference between a fact and an opinion?” It’s not an effective question because it only holds one student accountable and lets everyone else off the hook.…