When school is on holiday over the summer or even during winter break, it's surprising how quickly academic skills get left behind. In fact, a Harvard study found that students lose an average of 2.6 months of math skills during the summer months. The
How to make gamification work in your classroom Over the past 39 years we've watched gamification take shape in our classes and lessons. It's a powerful teaching strategy when leveraged correctly - but how and where to start gamification can be confusing for
The average person can spell around 48,000 words. Roughly speaking, that’s one-tenth of the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, half the amount of total words in The Hobbit, and about as long as that email you shouldn’t have sent that one time. Teaching students to memorise 48,000
You want your students to stop throwing a ball around the class. Is it better to let them keep the ball and give them detention, or take the ball away? Negative reinforcement is a classroom management strategy that focuses on removing (or negating) stimuli
Understanding Summer learning loss Summer learning loss – or the summer slide – is an educational phenomenon where students lose some of the knowledge, skills and ability they acquired over the school year. Besides the initial problem breaking the momentum of continual learning
The impact of Summer learning loss Want to understand Summer learning loss in a glance? Check out our Summer learning loss summary of the studies, stats and facts here. Summer learning loss plagues educators from year to year, seeing hard-fought lessons and work
Contextualised teaching and learning is the practice that answers the three most common student questions: ‘Why are we doing this?’ ‘When will I use this?’ ‘Is it in the exam?’ In other words – ‘why is this relevant to me?’ Defining relevancy
Grammar and writing are tricky because you most likely use correct grammar and writing everyday but without quite knowing why. It would be jarring to read ‘I saw a duck jump into a pond and he dove under the water for a wash’ -
Out of the 93% of teachers spending their own money to purchase school supplies, a whopping one quarter are spending upwards of $1000 per year.* Some of this is spent on pens and pencils, some of it is spent on maintaining infrastructure (clearly not
The 2018 State of Our Schools survey found that 9 out of 10 public school teachers use their own money to purchase supplies for their school or students (AEU). Moreover, half of these teachers spend more than $500 per year on basics such as
In summary: The 5E Instructional Model is a constructivist science learning method involving 5 key phases: Engagement, Exploration, Explanation, Elaboration and Evaluation. Here's what you need to know about the 5E Instructional Model - what the phases are, their desired outcomes, and what it looks
Literacy across curriculum ‘Literacy is every teacher’s responsibility.’ No matter your discipline, interests or teaching strengths, it’s essential for teachers to ensure their students are engaged in literacy. First, because students are struggling with literacy. Second, because students need literacy to understand what
It is human to err; and the only final and deadly error, among all our errors, is denying that we have ever erred. G.K Chesterton, the Prince of Paradox In 1993, two researchers (Robert J. Connors and Andrea A. Lunsford) and 50 analysers collected
There’s more to the question of the difference between scientific knowledge and literacy than first meets the eye. Our understanding of the world has never been better – for every advance we make into the digital world, for every discovery we make of the
At the core of science is the wonderment of inquiry. Encouraging this inquiry is how you bring science into the classroom, transforming your kids into budding scientists who want to discover the why’s hiding behind everyday phenomena. Luckily, there are ways to turn
