Family engagement is my "thing." So much so that I even wrote a book about it that was published a little over a year ago. I believe that a child's family is their first teacher. I further believe that we could learn a lot about how to best help our students learn if we would just rely a little bit more on the insight of their families. Backtrack about three years and a different district: My co-teacher and I decided to combine our classes and do a monthly STEM/STEAM parent engagement...

First, a little background on Maslow and Bloom. Abraham Maslow was an American psychologist. His hierarchy of needs framework is a popular theory of motivation. In this theory, Maslow states that our actions are motivated by our physiological needs. Most often this is represented by a pyramid, with the most basic needs at the bottom and the more complex needs at the top, as pictured below. Benjamin Bloom also developed a theory around how children learn, called Bloom's taxonomy. This...

Let's talk about our children for a minute. Let's talk about what they have been through the past eighteen-ish months. In March of 2020, the world was plunged into a global pandemic from out of nowhere. Many schools shut down during Spring Break Week and didn't reopen for the remainder of the school year. Our students were rapidly taken away from school, as well as their friends. Younger children, I can tell you from personal experience, had a very difficult time adjusting to this sudden...

The five stages of grief, as identified by Elisabeth Kubler Ross and David Kessler, are as follows: The five stages, denial , anger , bargaining , depression and acceptance are a part of the framework that makes up our learning to live with loss. They are tools to help us frame and identify what we may be feeling. Here are my own, personal, thoughts about the end of the school year and the Corona Virus Pandemic. Denial: What?? It's bad enough that we have to close schools? Can't we just keep...