It all started with the new student– we’ll call him John. He was not only new to our school, but new to the country. He would sit each day in class, silent and expressionless until dismissal, then saunter off toward his uncle without even a good-bye or smile. The kids tried to be friendly at first, but when their attempts were met with a wall of silence and blank stares, they soon lost interest. The students were generally kind to him, but one quiet morning, I saw his look of annoyance as a messy classmate’s papers began to crowd over and onto his desk.
John wasn’t able to communicate his annoyance, and also chose not to push the papers back over. Instead, he simply shifted his seat over to work on a smaller section of his desk. He avoided the problem. That’s one way to deal with it, I thought. I observed as the classmate continued to take over John’s personal space, and before long, John sat, frustrated with just a tiny corner of his desk space left. Finally, he turned and glowered at “Luke,” the offending space invader, with a, “Get your stuff off my desk” look. Luke just looked at him challengingly, then said, “What?” and then continued working.
Not gonna lie. This one’s for me. I currently have about 50 tabs open on fun activities to do with babies/toddlers between 14-16 months, and wanted to summarize them for myself and my husband. So I thought to myself, Hm. Where should I make this list? Microsoft Word? OneNote? Email? …I wish I could just put it on my blog so either Ben or I could find it really quickly on our phones whenever we needed. Oh heyyy… there’s an idea. I do actually search stuff on my own blog (especially recipes) pretty frequently, so I decided to compile my list here for me and for you :).
Anyone with a young child (or expecting to have one in the future) can benefit from this list! Experienced parents, pleasepleasePLEASEpleaseplease add ideas to the comments below! You of all people know how wonderful it is to come across a tried-and-true activity to change up the long afternoons with our little ones!
I sorted the activities into easy, medium, and hard. The easy activities are things you can do pretty much anywhere, anytime. They require little to no purchases or material preparation. The medium activities are still fairly simple, but require you to dig up some materials (scarves, clothespins) or purchase others (blocks, bubbles). Once you have the materials, though, you can consider it one of your “easy” activities. The hard activities are more involved– for the parent. They require more preparation (finger paints), cost (sand and water table) and/or clean-up. They are the kind of activities I would choose on my more ambitious days.
I used popsicle sticks in my classroom all the time. I used them during math, during social studies, during reading– you name it. If there were a large number of students, I had a use for popsicle sticks. Here’s what I did. First, I wrote each child’s name on a stick, then color-coded the tip of each stick– one color for boys, one color for girls:
Then I put them all in a jar, mixed them up, and voila! I just created one of my most frequently-used teaching tools. What could you possibly do with this jar of names? Well, I’m so glad you asked!
I think it’s good to have kids correct their own homework as much as possible. When they correct their own homework, they get immediate feedback on their mistakes (or lack thereof). They also have an opportunity to immediately ask how a problem they got wrong is done correctly.
Immediate feedback is key in student learning. Think about your own learning– if you’ve learned a math concept wrong, would you want to keep practicing it wrong for days before someone tells you otherwise? Or would you prefer for someone to immediately fix it ASAP so you can practice correctly from then on? Of course you’d rather have it fixed right away.
This method of paper correcting is more effective in catching misunderstandings than having the teacher collect a pile of homework, take it home over the weekend, and then hand it back on Monday. Sure, some kids immediately check to see how they did– they’re usually the ones that got everything right. Others just stuff it in their desks without even taking a second glance; oftentimes, those are the kids who need the most help.
Parents: It’s your son’s birthday party. On the invitation, you wrote that the party would go from 12:00-3:00pm. It’s 2:00pm, and you’ve already gone through all the activities you had planned. You told the kids they could just “play” until their parents arrived, and now you have twenty kids running around your house wreaking havoc on your newly polished floors and white walls. EEK.
Teachers: It’s field trip day, and the bus just dropped you off at the museum entrance. For some reason, all the doors are locked and no staff is there to greet you. After waiting ten minutes, you call the main office and are told they’ll be there in twenty minutes. Your students are entertaining themselves– some sitting in small groups chatting, others running around and playing a violent version of tag. Chaperones make a half-hearted attempt to calm some kids down, but let’s be honest– everybody wants to be the cool chaperone, so they won’t go too hard on the kids. Their behavior is already spiraling out of control, and you have another twenty minutes to wait. EEK. What do you do??
Play a game. A simple, quiet, but active and FUN game! Sound too good to be true? Read on and try it, my friend, and be won over.
A few months ago, I led a teacher training on how to use a new behavior system in Sunday school at my church. I outlined how the system of consequences would work, with the consequences progressing from a simple verbal warning all the way to stepping outside for some time out. Then one of the teachers shared her situation with me, “What if the kids want to go outside? When I threaten to send them outside, they say, ‘Oooh, can I go now?’ as if it’s a treat!”
First of all, ouch. That is a low blow, and hard for any teacher to hear– especially when she has volunteered time on her Sunday morning to serve children!
Before I had a chance to respond, another teacher chimed in, saying that we needed more severe consequences– stepping outside the room wasn’t going to motivate the kids enough to stop poor behavior. Ack. This was not the direction I was hoping to head in!
I think I gave some response about the real purpose of consequences (not to punish but to provide consistent reinforcement of boundaries), and how we shouldn’t make kids behave out of fear. But I knew my answer was incomplete. I also offered an example of what I might have said in response to the child, but still… there was something more to it, and I couldn’t quite put my finger on it.
Shaping hearts shapes behaviors
Months later, I started reading Don’t Make me Count to Three by Ginger Plowman, and I saw what the missing piece in my teacher instruction was. I realized it was missing not only from that training session, but also in previous posts I’ve written on shaping children’s behavior!
Parents and teachers, this one’s for you. If you are regularly around kids, you know there are frequently pockets of time when you need to keep them occupied. Whether it’s the last few minutes at the end of a school day or you’re waiting at a restaurant, resist pulling out technology to quell their boredom and try this game!
“Guess My Number” is a simple, fun, easy, and educational game for kids 7 and up that you can play anywhere that you have pen and paper. It’s a flexible game, and can be easily adapted for young elementary aged children or your middle school math whizzes. I played it often with my fourth graders and they always loved it.
Teachers: this is a game that almost any child in any level in your upper-grade class can happily and confidently participate in. Parents: this is a great anywhere-game that will engage their minds in a way that is really fun for them while working their mathematical brains– parenting WIN!
Pork tonkatsu! (Plating and photo creds to Chris C.)
Last week, I bought about a million pounds of sliced pork tenderloin from Costco. On top of the usual Costco bulk discount, there was a “manager’s special” which brought the price down an additional ~20%! I wasn’t exactly sure what I was going to do with twelve huge hunks of pork loin, but there was one thing I did know: pork tonkatsu was definitely on the menu this week!
Tonkatsu is a Japanese food where pieces of meat (usually pork, but I’ve also seen chicken) are breaded and fried. It is key to use panko (bread crumbs
I have a confession to make.
I use box mix for brownies. It’s true.
…BUT IT IS SO GOOD!!!!!
Ghirardelli Triple Chocolate Brownie Mix
I’ve made a lottttt of batches of brownies from scratch, but once I gave Ghirardelli’s Triple Chocolate Brownie Mix
The brownies are moist and chewy and chocolatey with that thin crackly layer on the top. There are big chunks of chocolate, and the edges are satisfyingly edgy, for you edge-lovers out there. They’re pretty much perfect, and at $10/6-pack from Costco… you can’t really ask for more from boxed goods…
Golden Coin Almond Jello Mix
…Unless if you’re making almond jello, in which case Golden Coin’s almond jello
cake jello.
I once observed a teacher leading a large class of students. I could tell she didn’t have much experience teaching for a number of reasons, but one of the most obvious was that she kept getting derailed. A lot. She would be mid-sentence when a kid would suddenly shoot their hand in the air. It caught her off-guard with the urgency of a text message, and she took the bait every time. Even if she was working toward a main point, she allowed the hand to slice her words mid-sentence as she responded, “–Yes?”
The urgent hand waving in the air won her attention, and eventually, everyone else’s. After a series of similar interruptions, she soon lost the interest of all of the students and spent the rest of the lesson struggling to get it back (unsuccessfully). It was a disaster.
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