The Joyful Classroom


Book Description

Students learn more—and with more joy—when lessons connect with their lives and interests while challenging them to stretch and grow. In this book, you'll find practical, ready-to-use strategies for creating active and exciting lessons. You'll learn about: Partnering and grouping students for optimum learning Using interactive learning structures such as Maître d' and Swap Meets to support active learning Incorporating acting, drawing, debating, and more into daily lessons while still meeting rigorous learning goals Infusing lessons with choices in what or how to learn to increase students ownership of their learning Incorporating student self-assessment tools to help children monitor and evaluate their own work and identify ways to improve their learning Filled with lesson plans, precise directions for interactive learning structures, planning guides, and more!




Joyful Learning


Book Description

Discover motivating, personalized learning strategies that all of your students will love! Build an active, responsive, and inclusive classroom where every student benefits. Through step-by-step directions, reproducible handouts, classroom-tested examples, and specific guidelines, teachers and teacher teams will discover 60 activities to help you: Quickly and easily modify and adapt design instruction for diverse learners, including students with cultural, language, learning, physical, or sensory differences Transform lectures and whole-class discussions through dynamic, student-centered learning experiences Immerse students in discussion, debate, creative thinking, questioning, teamwork, and collaborative learning Flexibly co-plan and co-teach with a variety of school professionals




Creating Joyful Classrooms


Book Description

Creating Joyful Classrooms is a practical response to the malaise in America’s schools created by high stakes testing, disrespect for the teaching profession, and resources being redirected to charter schools and private school vouchers. Classroom teachers feel helpless and students feel hapless. Joy has left the building. This book offers the antidote to return joy and passion to teaching and learning. Whether a beginning teacher or a seasoned veteran, this book shows the way back to timeless child-centered best practices that engage young children and increase academic achievement. As joyful classrooms multiply, their success will drive out the poisonous rancor of cynicism and despair to become beacons of hope for children everywhere. This book also makes the case for changing the status quo in the elementary school. The standard traditional grade school is failing to meet the needs of children growing up in the information age. Elementary schools must evolve into multi-grade, multi-dimensional safe havens that challenge children academically, while remembering to cherish childhood. Based upon the theory of invitational education, this book provides specific strategies, along with classroom management tools, to create highly engaging classrooms for young children. It also offers inspiring stories of heroic teachers who beat the odds to bring joy back to school. It’s not too late for a better tomorrow.




Childhood and Nature


Book Description

Presents a collection of essays combining anecdotal and theoretical insights into environmental ethics and human ecology to help foster environmentally responsible students.




Teach Like Finland: 33 Simple Strategies for Joyful Classrooms


Book Description

The best-selling book of easy-to-implement classroom lessons from the world’s premier educational system—now available in paperback. Finland shocked the world when its fifteen-year-olds scored highest on the first Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), a set of tests evaluating critical-thinking skills in math, science, and reading. That was in 2001; even today, this tiny Nordic nation continues to amaze. How does Finnish education—with short school days, light homework loads, and little standardized testing—produce students who match the PISA scores of other nations with more traditional “work ethic” standards? When Timothy Walker started teaching fifth graders at a Helsinki public school, he began a search for the secrets behind the successes of Finland’s education system. Highlighting specific strategies that support joyful K–12 classrooms and can be integrated with U.S. educational standards, this book, available in paperback for the first time, gathers what he learned and shows how any teacher can implement many of Finland's best practices. A new foreword by the author addresses the urgent questions of teaching, and living, in these pandemic times.




The Joyful Teacher


Book Description

"My wish," writes Berit Gordon, "is for there to be more joy and less struggle in a profession where people put in such tremendous effort and do such essential work." No matter what supports you might have in your school or district, you can take charge of your teacher growth and craft your own professional learning journey. The Joyful Teacherprovides a structure to help K-12 teachers across all content areas reflect on their professional development needs, set goals that work, and access practical strategies that will help them meet those goals. While anyone can pop in and pull out strategies for what's needed right now, the goals and strategies are organized in a progression to set teachers up for the most success and highest impact. Coaches and administrators will also find numerous ways to support the teachers they work with and help them feel and be effective. Each chapter begins with a self-assessment checklist to help you find which goal and strategy will be your entry point. Within each strategy you'll find step-by-step instructions, explanations for why and how the strategy works, a detailed "how to," supports and indicators to help you know if the idea is working, and references to help you continue exploring if you want to learn even more. Berit includes grade band suggestions and grade level modifications to help you make the strategy work best for you and your students. There is no "right" place to start and no goal that is more sophisticated or more important than any other. The Joyful Teacherhelps you prioritize what is most essential for what you need and choose goals and strategies that work for you and your students. Where will your journey begin?




Embracing a Culture of Joy


Book Description

K-12 teachers and administrators will : read about classroom teachers who have successfully implemented joy ; gain ideas for how to make classrooms joyful learning environments ; examine education jargon that negatively impacts school culture ; learn how to create a sense of community in school among teachers and students ; discover the importance of wonder and inquiry in engaging students.--Publisher's description.




Joyful Math


Book Description

"This book is about how to create invitations for young children to play with math ideas through art, literacy, and outdoor play. The focus of her book is really on math that occurs OUTSIDE of math time. How can we create space for children to play in our classrooms that builds on their own questions as well as the math they are studying in the curriculum? How can we create a joyful and playful space for math so that children feel like mathematical thinkers with valuable ideas from the very start? How can we create connections between math and children's lives so that they see math as creative and purposeful instead of just learning "school math"?"--




Teaching for Joy and Justice


Book Description

Teaching for Joy and Justice is the much-anticipated sequel to Linda Christensen's bestselling Reading, Writing, and Rising Up. Christensen is recognized as one of the country's finest teachers. Her latest book shows why. Through story upon story, Christensen demonstrates how she draws on students' lives and the world to teach poetry, essay, narrative, and critical literacy skills. Teaching for Joy and Justice reveals what happens when a teacher treats all students as intellectuals, instead of intellectually challenged. Part autobiography, part curriculum guide, part critique of today's numbing standardized mandates, this book sings with hope -- born of Christensen's more than 30 years as a classroom teacher, language arts specialist, and teacher educator. Practical, inspirational, passionate: this is a must-have book for every language arts teacher, whether veteran or novice. In fact, Teaching for Joy and Justice is a must-have book for anyone who wants concrete examples of what it really means to teach for social justice.




Start with Joy


Book Description

Start with Joy: Designing Literacy Learning for Student Happiness links what we know from the science of happiness with what we know about effective literacy instruction. By examining characters in the books they read, children develop empathy for others and come to understand that we all struggle and we all love. When given a choice about what to write, children express hopes, fears, and reactions to life's experiences. Literacy learning is full of opportunities for students to learn tools to live a happy life. Inside, you'll find: Seven Pillars: The author offers seven pillars that will make classrooms more joyful, engaging, and purposeful--Connection, Choice, Challenge, Play, Story, Discovery, and Movement. Ten Invitations: These ten lessons may be presented at any time of year in the context of any unit and include children's literature suggestions as well as recommended teacher talk to meet children's specific needs. Teaching Tools: Tools and resources that will help students tell their stories and make literacy learning something all students celebrate and cherish. This book honors the adventure that learning is meant to be. By infusing school days with happiness, teachers can support children as they become stronger readers, writers, and thinkers, while also helping them learn that strength comes from challenge, and joy comes from leading a purposeful life.