Image by Steve Evans on Flickr ; CC BY-NC 2.0 As a 20-year-old, I entered the teaching profession as a pit stop on my way to bigger and better things. Nine years later I’m still here. In that time, I’ve learned the best thing a teacher can...
Chris has difficulty forming letters with his pencil; his arm twists around in a circle, and he pushes his pencil through the paper. Anne jumps up from her desk every few minutes and is constantly turned around backward in her seat. Louis...
In my last post , I promised a series on lean manufacturing and its application to teaching. Mea culpa. While I have learned and applied much more from lean manufacturing than what I wrote in that post, I found it more difficult than...
Doing poster projects with my students has not been my forte. Some projects I’ve attempted required herculean efforts from all of us but delivered less than impressive results with little true learning having occurred. I’m choosing not to...
Image by Johnny McClung on Unsplash Studies done on children are showing a huge difference in vocabulary—a gap of up to 15 million words by the age of five. The studies have shown that even by two years old, the vocabulary gap is evident...
“I read it, but I don’t remember any of it!” the student exclaimed. And I understood. Although I am an avid reader, how many times have I found my eyes skimming over the page while my mind is elsewhere? For pleasure reading, this may not...
Photo by corina ardeleanu on Unsplash While I do love teaching and enjoy my job greatly, it is stressful being responsible for little humans all day, and one of the perks of being a teacher is having the summer “off.” (In many ways, it’s...
The first year I taught school, I moved from Kansas to Spanish Lookout, Belize. I taught thirteen students in grades 1-3 at the Spanish Refugee school run by the Kleine Gemeinde Mennonites. All but one of my students were native Spanish...
Over the years, teachers have become very creative with helping students get through the winter slump–those months between Christmas and Easter when the only hint of vacation or respite is a huge blizzard or ice storm that leaves the roads...
The last post gave big-picture ideas of themes and approaches for your class devotions. This post shares specific, daily plans and suggestions for materials. Monday: Grades 1-6 have chapel together with a dad coming in to speak. I arrange...
Photo by Katerina Holmes from Pexels Here are a few suggestions that I have found to be very helpful when teaching English classes. Too often, some of these concepts are confusing to students, and they fail to grasp onto them, causing them...
“Why do we have to know all this stuff?” Sure, sometimes students are just grasping for a reason not to care about their homework, but it’s actually a good question that deserves a thoughtful response. I briefly addressed this issue in a...
Photo by Натали Хмельницкая on Unsplash “A thrill of hope, the weary world rejoices, for yonder breaks a new and glorious light!” (Placide Cappeau) It really feels like a weary world, with many hard things in our school family, troubles in...
Photo by Dan Kiefer on Unsplash The wise men are flattened this morning, not by the glory but because a small person has pillowed their heads on Smarties. They look extremely relaxed. A sheep is creeping up on the manger, and various...
“How do you wash these crayons?” asked a student. I was puzzled—why does she want to wash her crayons? Kayla showed me the box of crayons. It said “Washable Crayons.” I explained that you don’t wash the crayons, rather the crayon marking...
In their attempt to find new trade routes to Southeast Asia, Spanish and Portuguese sailors in the 15th century worked tirelessly to figure out what it would take to sail down around the southern tip of Africa and on east to what is now...
In church this morning, our deacon preached on the fallacy of basing our identity on things that can be taken away and stressed the need to place our identity in Christ alone. Immediately, my mind flew back quite a few years and relived a...
There is only one place in the world where I can walk into the local TV station and get instant coverage just by picking up the mike, smiling into the camera, and announcing myself. That place is a First Nations reserve in the bush of...
I loved hearing one of the first-graders asking, “Can I say the verses by myself? I know them.” This child proceeded to say the verses as we were waiting in the bus line at dismissal time. And she knew them better than the teacher did!...
