The Dock - An Anabaptist Resource for Teaching & Learning

Myron Brubacher proposes nine techniques for bolstering an engaging early elementary classroom. He shares personal stories of building relationships with students and highlights the importance of innovative approaches.

A child’s education is the process of many people working together to build something beautiful. As an early elementary grade teacher, you are called to lay the foundation, even though in the end your work may be the most overlooked part of the project. How can you make the student's first years in school not only stimulating, but genuinely educational? Myron shares five complimentary principles:

Science is the exploration of a world "charged with the grandeur of God." If the natural world is the work of a loving Creator, we should expect it to be "charged with the grandeur of God," as the Victorian poet Gerard Manley Hopkins asserted. In this presentation, Steven Brubaker offers eight ways to help our students loosen the scales on their eyes and really see the presence and wonder of God in the world that he made.

Photo by Jakob on Unsplash Image by Lorenzo Cafaro from Pixabay “Are you grading for spelling on this?” a middle-school-aged student asked about his essay. Of course I was grading for spelling—on this essay and on other assignments. But for some older students, there is an assumption that since spelling tends to be taught only in younger grades that they do not need to proofread (or that their computer’s spellcheck will find everything for them). Although formal spelling classes t

Generation Alpha students are the children who have been born in the years after 2010. They are growing up surrounded by and often immersed in technology. They are about age twelve and younger, around grades one through six, and technology has often been a part of their lives since birth, unlike those of us who remember what it was like before we had “everything” at our fingertips. Their attitudes and experiences are being shaped by the technology they use, if they are allowed to use it. Typi

I love books. I could dream them and wear them and eat them for breakfast. I have a special place in my heart for children’s books. But the hardest age for me to find appropriate reading material for is the emerging reader—the child who is learning to read well, but is not yet up to the challenge of most chapter books. I know plenty of delightful individual books, but they stand alone. My early reader needs lots of practice: ten books, at least. Here is a list I’ve compiled of easy reads for f

In this post, we continue digesting the input from the 85 Anabaptist educators who filled out our survey. For Part 1 of the results, which includes demographic profiles of respondents and the types of curricula and resources their schools make available, go here. How valuable are these tools to you?We asked respondents to rate the value of a number of digital tools in their educational work. They could choose from “Don’t use,” “Helps a little,” “Very useful

Other titles that received one mention each: AOP, ARTiculations, BCE, Betty Lukens, Copp Clark, Demme, Foundational, Foundational Math, Geraldine Koehn’s music books, Globe Book Co., Grace Press, Hake Publishers, IEW, Journeys with God, local, Memoria, Moyer Music, Positive Action Bible Curriculum, Purposeful Design, School Aid, Social Studies Alive!, stuff teachers make up, Teaching Textbooks, Wordly Wise, WWPPS, Zaner-Bloser, and “a few others not on this list. @import url(https://th

Perhaps you, like me, would like to be one of those noble teachers with a classroom pet. You've heard the student say, “Well last year Miss Miller had a rabbit/gerbil/parrot/goose and we got to name it and hold it every day! When are you getting a pet, Miss Zehr?” But perhaps you, like me, have held funerals for goldfish, annihilated the tadpoles just when they were growing legs, and experienced the trauma of gerbils cannibalizing each other. Classroom pets certainly come with their own set of

It seems like school trips to our nation’s capital have been a part of my life since the day I was born. As a high school teacher, my dad took his senior class on a day trip to the Capitol each year. As a youngster, I would accompany my parents on these trips. Here I am, 25 years later, taking my seniors to DC. Things have really changed over the years. The days when beat-boxers sat in the Mall thumping on five gallon buckets and kicking shopping carts are long gone. Now, security has gone thro

Teachers, board members, and patrons usually agree on long-term goals for the school, but the methods to achieve those goals are sometimes as numerous as the participants. How can the realization that our goals are similar guide us in smoothing out the ‘how-to’ wrinkles? Can we leverage common vision to avoid being crippled by division?

Catforms LLC has been tracking CAT scores for years, and correlating them with the curriculum publisher behind those students and scores. As an analyst of this third-party generated data, Allen can speak into questions like, “What curriculum consistently produces better results?” “Does the same publisher always score higher in every subject?” “How do Anabaptist publishers rank with those curriculums which are produced by larger, well-known companies?”

Do your students receive diplomas? How is the world landscape changing regarding requirements of accreditation? Are your students receiving the credentials they need to participate in Kingdom service opportunities?

What records does your school consistently keep? Do they present an accurate picture of what your school has been accomplishing? Medical forms, student files with enrollment and academic records, parental consent forms, teacher hire agreements… Is all this paperwork necessary?