Indoor Recess Ideas from GoNoodle

Active children are more engage students, but we all know that the cold or rainy weather can make it challenging to fit enough physical activity into the school day.  Don’t worry!  GoNoodle has you covered.

GoNoodle’s Indoor Recess channel has over 20 longer mash-up videos of their most popular content made specifically for when the weather gets in the way of going outside.  Take a look at these videos that will give your children the break that they need.

(Free membership required to access videos).

Power Up! (12 min)

It’s Party Time (14 min)

Animal Instincts (17 min)

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Supporting STEM Learning for Young Children

screen-shot-2017-01-11-at-2-56-38-pmA new report by a group of early childhood leaders offers a series of guiding principles and recommendations on ways to take action to support high-quality STEM education and experiences for young children.  The report, “Early STEM Matters: Providing High-Quality STEM Experiences for All Young Learners,” is the culmination of two years of work by the Early Childhood STEM Working Group, which was co-organized by Erikson Institute and UChicago STEM Education at the University of Chicago.

The group identified these guiding principles:

  1. Adult supervision is necessary to help guide children through their STEM experiences and support their natural curiosity.
  2. Discussion and visual representation, such as drawing and writing, must be a part of STEM education.
  3. Building adults’ confidence in STEM concepts is important to shaping children’s own attitudes toward STEM.
  4. Culture, race, and socio-economic status influence children’s STEM experiences.

The guiding principles informed the six recommendations of the group to improve STEM education in early childhood classrooms, including

  1. Through advocacy and messaging, raise awareness about the importance of access to high-quality STEM education for all children.
  2. Improve STEM-related teacher preparation and ongoing professional development.
  3. Involve parents in their children’s STEM experiences by offering initiatives and resources that encourage their participation outside the classroom.
  4. Develop resources and offer guidance to support educators’ efforts to implement STEM experiences in the classroom.
  5. Make sure that educational standards at the state level explicitly address STEM disciplines.
  6. Establish a long-term research agenda to shape ongoing support for and development of early childhood STEM education.

Read the full report here: Early STEM Matters

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Empathy vs. Manners

Which do you think is more important to teach children: empathy or manners?  If you chose “manners”, then you align with 58% of the respondents to a Sesame Workshop survey.  Teachers, however, overwhelmingly (67%) stated that empathy, or the ability to feel another’s pain, was more important.

We assume that teaching children to have good manners will lead them to be empathetic.  There’s little evidence that is the case, though.  Even bullies display good manners around adults.

Check out the results of the survey or take it yourself here: K is for Kind: A National Survey on Kindness and Kids.

The Making Common Caring Project at Harvard University offers suggestions for cultivating empathy in children here.

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New Feature in PEACH — Save Time Block Notes in Templates

A common, teacher-requested feature has been added to PEACH: the ability to save notes to time blocks when creating templates in PEACH.  For example, “Breakfast” may be a time block that you created and saved to your lesson plan template.  Each week, when you create plans based on that template, you find yourself entering the same note for the time block, “Children will assist teachers in setting out napkins and milk cartons”.

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Wouldn’t it be great to type that once and have it automatically appear on your lesson plans each week?  That is now possible in PEACH!

To do so, follow these steps:

  1. Create a new lesson plan based on your personal lesson plan template.
  2. For each time block where you want to add a permanent note, click the three-dot menu next to the time.
  3. Choose “Add a Note” and type in your note in the box that appears.  Click “Save”.
  4. Give your lesson plan template a new name and click the pink “Save Lesson Plan TEMPLATE” button.

 

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That’s it!  From now on, when you create a new lesson plan based on that template, your time block note will appear.

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Seasons Greetings and Happy New Year!

Like most of you, the Best Practices team will be enjoying some much needed time with family and friends during the next couple of weeks.  The blog will also take a hiatus until after the new year.  See you in 2017!

happy-holidays

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