Classroom Culture

Instill a sustainable, positive culture in your classroom with these lessons and activities.

Elementary - 8 Activities for Building a Compassionate Classroom Culture

Middle School - 7 Activities to Foster Decision-Making and Character Skills

High School - 6 Ways to Embed Mental Wellness into Classroom Culture

Be Good People is an incredible health and social emotional learning resource that follows 5 themes: Self-Awareness, Self-Management, Social Awareness, Relationship Skills, and Responsible Decision Making.
Each section comes with more than 10 lessons or extension activities that help you address these themes with your students.

This resource has content for kindergarten through grade 12.

Made by Minnesota Educators
Educators at the St. Croix River Education District in rural Minnesota.

"An upstander is a person who recognizes injustice, knows their personal strengths and uses those strengths to create change."

This resource explores how to be an upstander in a variety of settings and includes:
*a full teacher's guide
*FREE virtual museum visit can be booked to accompany
*Canadian upstanders & upstanders you know
*stories
*rights
*take a stand
*tell
*act

This is a fabulous list of 21 books to teach students about everything from self-regulation to patience.

These books would be a wonderful addition to any classroom library or library and would be excellent as read-aloud stories for students, followed by discussion.

These books are all connected to 21st century skills - especially self management or character/self-regulation.

This is a resource to plan Character Day and provide activity ideas all year long!

Included are:
Helpful Links
Attachments
Examples of School Initiatives

Sun West Character High School 10-12 Guidebook - please use the table of contents to navigate this guidebook. Also, we invite you to share resources you think would be suitable for this guidebook with any of the author's of this guidebook.

Sun West Character Middle Years Grade 6-9 Guidebook - please use the table of contents to navigate this guidebook. Also, we invite you to share resources you think would be suitable for this guidebook with any of the author's of this guidebook.

Sun West Character Elementary K-5 Guidebook - please use the table of contents to navigate this guidebook. Also, we invite you to share resources you think would be suitable for this guidebook with any of the author's of this guidebook.

Character Playbook is an innovative digital course that uses engaging strategies to educate students about cultivating and maintaining healthy relationships during their critical middle school years. Comprised of six lessons that cover key concepts around positive character development, social-emotional learning (SEL), and building healthy relationships, Character Playbook allows students to engage with real-world scenarios, including examples of bystander intervention, resolving conflicts, effective communication, and positive relationships.

This Course Covers
Analyzing Influences
Understanding & Managing Emotions
Communicating Effectively
Resolving Conflicts
Stepping In
Making Decisions

Explore the library of Podcasts to access short podcasts outlining activities that you can implement in your classroom right away.
Listen for free, anytime! Choose from the library of 295 podcasts.
Or sign up for the CharacterStrong Weekly to have the short, to-the-point podcasts delivered directly to your inbox.

Colours have the power to make us think and feel different emotions. This assignment allows students to dive into the psychology of colours. 

An inquiry-based project to map the land in your community. The key concepts in this unit are grounded in Indigenous beliefs of interconnectedness, connectedness, and respect for all things.

The driving inquiry questions for this unit are:
1. How can respect for the land be shown?
2. What do we look for when setting up a camp?
3. What stories or teachings are connected to key locations in and around our community?
4. How has the land around our community changed over time?
5. Who do we share our community’s lands with?

The Compassion Project for Character Development PeBL from Everfi

With so much emphasis placed on improvements in math and science, skills like compassion often receive less classroom time. This unintended trade-off may be short-sighted, as compassion is an important social-emotional skill that begins to develop in early childhood and is essential for lifelong health and success. Learning compassion increases students’ own sense of wellbeing and improves the learning environment for all learners. EVERFI’s new SEL program, The Compassion Project, is the first comprehensive, no-cost program designed to help educators facilitate lessons around fundamental SEL skills for students in grades 2-4, focusing on the complex but critical skill of compassion.

Grades 2-4 and about 45 minutes.

This Course Covers
Understanding Compassion
Self Compassion
Practicing Compassion

Grab a tissue and watch the video.

What a wonderful gift to give your students.

Enjoy.

Summary:
-after a mini unit on pencil sketching, have students sketch a Saskatchewan scene. Be sure students do not include a lot of detail.
-photocopy the sketch
-use primary colours to paint the picture
-allow the students to use the paints to create secondary colours
-paint the second picture using only the secondary colours.
-display the two art samples
-look at and discuss various Sk art and talk about colours
Outcomes:
CP6.11 Investigate and use visual art forms, images, and art-making process to express ideas about identity.
CP6.12 Demonstrate increased skills and problem-solving abilities in a variety of visual art media.
CR6.3 Examine arts expressions and artists of various times and places.

For the past two years, Dinsmore Composite School has been developing a mentorship program for K-8 as part of the school timetable. The purpose of the program was to provide opportunities for older students to develop leadership skills and to foster collaboration, communication and problem-solving skills among all students. The planning and implementation process as well as an overview of the learning outcomes and activities will be highlighted. Participants will be invited to share their own experiences with mentorship in their schools and classrooms.

This rubric was created for the final project for an ELA Indigenous and Norse Narratives UBD unit plan. Throughout the unit, the grade nine students read legends to the grade three students (the benefits of being in a K-12 school). As we read through narratives and legends in the class, students began to discover ideas for their own personal narrative or legend. I asked the students to make the legend for a grade two or three reading level. I asked them to do this because we planned on reading the stories to the grade three students. The grade three students were also incorporated in drawing the pictures for the story. This developed the students’ collaboration skills because they needed to be aware of the grade three student’s thoughts and how they learn. This assignment also asked the students to develop their communication skills with the grade three students, as they would need to describe their idea for pictures to the grade three students. Throughout the unit, the students developed their own character because they had to be more aware of their actions and language around grade three students. I believe it helped student’s realize there are younger students within the school who look up to them, even if they are unaware of it.

Plan for the Unexpected and Help Relieve Stress
Having to cover a class last minute? Need an emergency sub plan? Check out these easy, FREE activities from the CharacterStrong curriculum! Amidst this crazy time, the resources will help you pre-plan for the uncertainty of an educator absence or staff shortage.
Includes resources for:
- Prek-2
- 3-5
- 6-8
- 9-12