Teaching advice and tips:
- How to be an evangelizing catechist - a Sadlier webinar
- Advice for creating a smoothly running classroom.
- Edutopia - Advice, techniques and professional development as a catechist or teacher. Many free downloads and handouts available.
- What is your learning style? Teachers teach most readily the way they learn. Becoming aware of your own style also makes you more aware of the need to vary the mode of instruction for different styles. This quick quiz will help.
- How to build an engaging lesson plan.
- Thinking in terms of SWBAT - Jared Dees
- Rule of three - how to focus a lesson
- Round up of student engagement strategies.
- Three ways to keep kids actively engaged
- Using a lesson hook
- Seven Scaffolding Strategies
- Charts are a great way to help kids see a process, procedure, system or sequence. They are most important for visual learners, but all can benefit.
- How to keep kids from getting bored - engaging lesson planning.
- Creative ways to use the textbook.
- Religion Teacher's Guide to Lesson Planning which includes a great compilation of classroom activities and strategies
- Dees - How to help students encounter Christ in the classroom
- Smart Classroom Management - Short articles with excellent tips. You can also subscribe to receive them weekly ( free).
- How to teach effectively
- How to deal with student boredom
- More tips for combating boredom in class
- Bloom's Taxonomy ala Seinfeld; a flip using this video
- How to assess what kids have learned in 72 creative ways
- Exit cards - a good 'formative assessment' for the end of a lesson
- Quick Self-Assessment Tools you can use with your students, so they can tell you what they have learned.
- Ways of eliciting student feedback.
- Involving kids in their own learning - using a K-W-L chart
- Using anchor charts to help kids visualize and remember
- The importance of active learning and struggle in retaining concepts and information
- Evangelizing Catechesis - including the kerygma in every lesson plan
Important Online Teaching Tools
- Safe YouTube. Use this to generate links to YouTube videos free of ads and adult content.
- EdPuzzle lets you insert questions that need to be answered into online videos and then assign them.
- PearDeck is an add-on which makes a Google Slide presentation interactive.
- NearPod makes a lesson interactive and gives you ways to assess student understanding in the course of the lesson
- Google Tools
- A video guide to how to set up a Google classroom to help you get organized
- How to organize a Google Classroom and your Google Drive
- Make a worksheet for Google Classroom
- Turn a worksheet into a digital document
- How to make Google forms for the classroom - reactions, polls, quizzes
- Make a worksheet for Google Classroom
- How to organize a Google Classroom and your Google Drive
- How to insert audio to Google Slides
- Flipgrid
- Using Flipgrid to teach
- 50 Ways to use Flipgrid. These are designed for 'regular' school, but many of the activities can be adapted for RE.
- Kahoot
- Using Kahoot with Google Classroom
- Screencastify - the way to make a video to teach
- One instructional video that shows how to use it
- Another step-by-step instructional video
Online Teaching Tips and Techniques
- Assessment. How do we know that kids know something? Some of these points can apply to RE.
- Four Key Aspects of Online Teaching. Many of you have reported that you have discovered many of these through your own experience.
- How to build an online learning community. Some of these tips can work in your RE learning group.
- Tips for online instruction
- How to read the virtual room
- Two simple ways to improve online instruction - interaction and collaboration
- Creating community in an online classroom
Getting the Year Started
- Classroom icebreakers and more icebreakers and still more icebreakers
- Ideas for the First Day of Class
- Ten First Week Mistakes Not to Make
- Ways to learn names
- Virtual icebreakers you can use on Zoom
- 50 back to school activities for remote learning . Some of these might be useful starter activities.
- Cute ways to introduce yourself to students
Homework and Take Home Strategies
Homework should meet one of these goals: a) to preview what will happen during the lesson; or b) to review and reinforce what was taught; and/or c) to spark family discussion at home.
Homework should meet one of these goals: a) to preview what will happen during the lesson; or b) to review and reinforce what was taught; and/or c) to spark family discussion at home.
- Cultivate an automatic discussion in the car going home with this sheet.
- Tips for communicating with parents
- Action Homework assignments
- Ask Me About handout - send kids home with a 'script' with questions for the parents to ask about what the kids learned in class
Games and Class Activities
- Review Games to use in the classroom.
- Making your own Jeopardy game online. We also have a Jeopardy game that hooks into a monitor and can be modified for class review.
- This site gives you free craft templates, Bingo games, etc.
- Different short classroom games to play. You can use these to warm up the groups, or adapt to use to teach an idea or concept.
- Paper Dali - a very useful blog with games, activities and coloring sheets.
- Game Based Activities and Assessments - A long catalog of web based resources, along with some advice about how to successfully integrate games in learning.
- Complex coloring pages are all the rage. Here are some that might be useful.
- Good ideas are available from Catholic Playground.
- Breakout is a wonderful classroom game system. Create a series of locked boxes that correspond to puzzles that have be solved using teamwork. Read about it in action here.
- Kinesthetic (movement) techniques to engage students from Jared Dees
- A collection of review games from Jared Dees
- A collection of games to play in the classroom - many good for primary and intermediate
- A large collection of classroom games - some with video tutorials
- The Unfair Game - a good review game with a twist.
Special Education Resources:
- Fire Drill Social Story - helps special needs students understand and cope with a fire drill
- 49 phrases to use to calm an anxious child - Not all can be used in class, but several are good to have in the back of your mind to use when needed
- Everyone is different - an intro to autism that can be shown to kids fourth or fifth grade and above.
- Supporting students with dyspraxia in the classroom.