July 2017 - Minds in Bloom

One of the biggest challenges teachers face is to building classroom community. Making your classroom a welcoming environment and ensuring that all students feel safe and invited is a tall order. Luckily, this post shares a huge list of ideas to build classroom community, so click through to read - and bookmark it for future reference!

Build Classroom Community – A Giant List of Ideas!

Our Favorite FREE tool! Check out this post to learn all about Trello for teachers! It’s FREE, easy, and our favorite tool to keep organized! As the teacher, you are the primary architect of your classroom culture. You make the rules. You decide which behaviors are rewarded – even subtly with a smile or a few encouraging words – and which are discouraged. You can add community-building elements to

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Are your students failing to turn in their homework? Do you want to spice up your homework routine? Our guest blogger shares a fun homework alternative that she calls a plateful of ideas! Her suggestions are for primary grades, but the idea can be easily adapted to any grade level. Click through to read more!

A Plateful of Ideas

We’re excited to welcome Scipi back to the blog today! She’s sharing a really fun homework idea that she likes to call a Plateful of Ideas! We hope it gives you lots of ideas! When I taught the primary grades in a Title I school, I often found homework was seldom returned. I knew I had to come up with an idea that would be

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Encouraging Kids to Write with “Write About” Ideas

Minds in Bloom is delighted to welcome Sandra, from Mrs. Naufal’s Nook, to the blog today! She’s sharing her tried-and-true tips for encouraging kids to write with “write about” ideas. Enjoy! As a teacher, I am thrilled to read a good book to a class. I often look for books to which students can relate. Many can be about real-life situations they have encountered, such as

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Have you ever thought about how you can use matches to teach metaphors? What about using an ostrich egg to teach writing? Our guest blogger shares an insightful post about using the unexpected to teach the everyday, so click through to read her ideas in full.

Matches, Eggs, and Sidewalk Chalk: Using the Unexpected to Teach the Everyday

We’re delighted to welcome Rebecca Gettelman to Minds in Bloom today! Rebecca is sharing some really awesome ideas about using the unexpected to teach the everyday lessons, like grammar and writing. Read on to find out more! If you search through my teaching boxes, mixed in among the red pens and teacher’s manuals of the typical middle school teacher’s stash, you will find a box

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As teachers of the 21st century know, our world is global thanks to technological advancement. Schools and teachers need to work at creating global connections for and with their students so students learn more about the diversity, communities, and world around them. Our guest blogger shares some great resources to do that, so click through to read her post.

Creating Global Connections in the Elementary Classroom

Hello. Hola. Bonjour. Hallo. Ni Hao. I’m Julie from Globe Trottin’ Kids, and I am excited to be guest blogging for Minds in Bloom. Our world has never been more connected, and the need to create opportunities for our youngest students to learn about the world has never been more important. Connecting students globally with diverse literature, current events, projects, and activities will set them

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Novel Studies for the 21st Century Learner

We’re delighted to welcome our next guest blogger to Minds in Bloom! Shalyn is a teacher librarian who is sharing with us how to make novel studies more appropriate for 21st century skills and learning. Let’s go back in time and imagine that you are in your elementary/middle/high school classroom. The teacher announces that you are going to begin your literature circle rotation for the

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