Education Resources Blog

After the last two years being anything but normal, you might be on a constant quest for ideas and ways to support the social-emotional wellbeing of your students and boost their self-esteem. Social-emotional learning (SEL) has become a critical focus in helping our students grow not only personally, but academically as well. In partnership with Cathy Henry, an educator and founder of The Curriculum Corner and Free Word Work, we've created this Motivation Station Social-Emotional Lesson Plan activity to help spread a little positivity! And it's not only approaching the topic from a self-love standpoint, but encourages peer-to-peer support as well!

HAPPY BIRTHDAY WORLD! While we know every day is Earth Day, on April 22nd, we honor and celebrate this place we call home by demonstrating support to protect, respect and care for our planet. Founded in 1970, and celebrated by more than a billion people, Earth Day is a day to teach us about environmental issues and show partnership in making our world a happier, healthier place to live—giving Mother Earth the best birthday gift ever! This year's theme is, Invest in our planet, an all-encompassing movement to not only protect our planet, but also protect and preserve our health, our families and our livelihoods. To serve this mission we are all called upon, and as educators, that includes helping our students discover ways in which they can take personal action to help. After all, the future of our planet rests in their precious little hands.

Self-Awareness: the ability to see yourself clearly. How do others see me? How do I see myself? How are my actions being interpreted? Are my actions in line with the person I want to be perceived as? What are my strengths and weaknesses? How can I use those to make a positive impact? As children ask these questions to cultivate an understanding of how their choices, emotions, and actions affect the world around them, it is important we as educators help guide them in exercises to enhance their self-awareness, and of course, make learning about it fun! In this bonus installment of our social-emotional learning unit series, we spark discussion among students about what it means to be self-aware.

Chinese New Year, also known as the Spring Festival, has been celebrated for thousands of years. It is one of the most important holidays widely celebrated in many Asian countries and territories including Mainland China, Hong Kong, Macau, Taiwan, Vietnam, Malaysia, Singapore, Korea, Thailand. Usually falling between January 21st and February 20th, this year's start of the Chinese New Year will occur on Tuesday, February 1st, and is the Year of the Tiger. The celebration lasts for about 15 days. Gung Hay Fat Choy is a common Chinese New Year’s greeting in Chinese Cantonese, which means “wishing you great happiness and prosperity.” On Chinese New Year, the themes of happiness, wealth, longevity, luck and good fortune are celebrated. Some of the traditional celebrations include family gatherings, visiting friends and relatives (baai nin), exchanging “lucky money” contained in red envelopes (lai see), decorating homes with paper decorations and scrolls, lion dances, and fireworks. Chinese New Year is a special holiday to celebrate with your class while teaching them others’ cultures and comparing them to American traditions. We have put together a collection of fun, hands-on and Common Core-aligned lessons and activities, classroom decorations, and craft projects for you to explore and enjoy with your class, and I want to share them with you!

Developing a Growth Mindset isn't easy - but that's what makes it important. There are talents you're born with, talents you develop, and talents that aren't yours...yet. Research shows that your mindset is what drives your abilities to achieve goals and accomplishments, so when we suggest that a student's strengths lie 'elsewhere' - we're actually doing them a disservice to divert their dedication in another direction.  To develop a growth mindset, we must first understand ourselves, and what strengths we have that help us achieve success in all endeavors. To help students realize these things, we can point them in the direction of looking at goals they've already achieved, milestones they've reached, tools and resources available to them, and asking for input from those around them. Enter this fabulous printable take-home activity created with ideas from Dr. Melissa Hughes, expert on whole brain teaching and learning: My Growth Mindset Year Journal.

Gratitude: to show appreciation for. It's easier to focus on the bad, but to develop a strong growth mindset, we must help our students focus on the good. Going beyond saying thank you to others, gratitude is being thankful for all that we are blessed with, and is shown through acts of kindness, cooperation, and embrace. In this bonus installment of our social-emotional learning unit series, we spark discussion among students about what it means to develop a grateful heart.

Reading broadens the imagination, exercises your brain, and is one of the best tools to build learning and understanding of vocabulary. As educators, we aspire to inspire a generation of students who love to read. And as you retain more information when you read, then discuss, then teach others - your reading comprehension exercises are working to do just that. We've once again partnered with Cathy Henry from Free Word Work and The Curriculum Corner to put together a lesson plan that works great for distance or hybrid learning, and helps students in 1st-3rd grade work on identifying parts of a story, or summarizing what they've read. Introducing - our Rainbow Summary Lesson Plan.

It's no secret that we're all dealing with a lot right now. Between anxiety about health & safety, isolation, and inequity, it has obviously been a rough couple years. And as students return to learning in this back-to-school season, there's no question that we all need to focus some efforts on supporting mental health. We've rounded up some of our best free resources and downloads, to help you re-engage learners with movement, calming activities, breathing exercises, and behavior management techniques, to help your students when "overwhelmed" is an understatement.

As students today are spending more time sitting with technology than ever before, educators continue to innovate with creative ways to get them up and moving, while learning as they go. And after a year centered around terms like isolation, quarantine, and shelter-at-home, finding new ways to engage students and welcome them back to school buildings for learning can be a challenge. But we've got a fun way to get the wiggles out. And as you may have guessed, it's another free sensory path for schools! (Download our forest adventure sensory path here!)

With traditional education instruction rooted in desk-sitting and blackboard-writing, teachers today are constantly innovating to reach students where they are, and how they learn best. In a classroom full of visual learners, auditory learners, and kinesthetic learners, educators have found creative ways to help students learn through viewing, hearing, and doing. Enter - the sensory path for schools.