Stoplight Plan

Primary and elementary students must be taught how to handle their school tasks. Using a common system in the classroom makes it easier for students to keep track of when their tasks are due. In this system, the red, yellow, and green highlights indicate when a task is due. Using the familiar icon of a stoplight, students learn how to manage their time to ensure that tasks with the shortest due date are completed first.

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Put a Target on Your Goal

Consistency is the secret to success in reaching goals. Doing something each day to work toward small goals keeps one on target to reach a big goal. The ultimate goal is written in the center of the bulls-eye. Each circle represents smaller daily, weekly, and monthly goals that lead to the big goal. By breaking a big goal into many small goals, it is just as simple to achieve a big goal as a small goal. It just takes a little more time!

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Time Flies

Designing a timeline is a creative way for young students to develop an understanding of chronological order and differing lengths of time. It helps them learn how much time they need for non-negotiable activities such as sleep and school. It also helps them see how much time they spend on other activities such as technology and sports. A visual timeline can help students decide which activities are most important and why they must limit some activities.

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A Question of Time

When students begin to learn time management, they first need to understand how long things take. Mastering the basic time units of second, minute, hour, day, week, month, and year are essential in mastering the ability to estimate time for tasks and manage time. Students also need to understand that time progresses at the same rate, whether they are doing something difficult or doing something they enjoy. Although it seems as if time goes faster when they’re having fun, it’s passing at the same pace.

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Finding Time

Most teens will have some chaos when it comes to keeping track of assignments, schedules, and events for school. Some are naturally organized, and others need explicit guidance. The volume of demands on their time each day makes it necessary for them to have a reliable planning system. This lesson is best taught at the beginning of the year, but it is appropriate for any time students need help organizing and managing their schedules.

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Score! Hit Your Goals

Goal setting is one of the most powerful techniques for achieving success in life. Students who learn to set goals and work to reach them tend to have more clarity, have more self-confidence, and take pride in their achievements. Goals should be SMART: specific, measurable, action-oriented, realistic, and timely.

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What’s on Your Schedule?

Time management is one of the most important skills for students to learn if they are to juggle busy school and personal schedules. Using a blocking system on a grid can help them visualize where pockets of time can be found that might be used productively. In this lesson, students will see where they have time to spare and where they may have time conflicts.

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Budget Your Time

Time management is a critical skill in today’s fast-paced world. Students can quickly become overwhelmed with multiple projects, due dates, and extracurricular activities. Learning to manage and budget time will help them be more productive, procrastinate less, and get things done ahead of schedule. This lesson will give students a concrete example of where their time goes in a typical 24-hour weekday.

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Read and Understand!

There are numerous strategies that can be used to help students improve their reading comprehension. Strategies addressed in this lesson include asking questions before, during, and after reading a text, predicting what the text will be about based on the cover, and making connections between the text and something in the reader’s life.

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Be a Memory Champion!

Mnemonics have been used to assist with memorization for thousands of years. If you were taught Please Excuse My Dear Aunt Sally for the order of operations in math, you’ve used a mnemonic. There are many different types of mnemonic systems. Sometimes silly actions work best because they are unusual, and therefore are less likely to be forgotten.

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Reading Comprehension

There are numerous strategies that can be used to improve reading comprehension. The main strategy addressed in this lesson is using titles and cover illustrations to predict what the text will be about.The lesson also touches on strategies such as visualization, making connections, or asking questions. Many readers actually use these strategies naturally. However, other students, especially students who aren’t strong visual learners, may find these strategies give their reading the boost it needs.

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Mind Map It!

Mind maps are a great way for students to enhance their reading comprehension. Visually organizing the plot of a book, listing the characters and what happens to them allows them to solidify the information in their minds, making it easier to recall what they have read and how it connects to their feelings and the world around them. This is a technique that can help students establish life-long learning techniques.

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Anything Goes Brainstorming

Brainstorming is a technique for generating a large volume of ideas in a short period of time. It has been used in business and schools for decades. Brainstorming can be used for problem solving, for creative ideas, for developing vocabulary, for creating rules and policies, and anything that benefits from a large input of ideas.

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Give Your Memory a Boost!

Memory is like a muscle. It needs to be exercised to grow stronger. Mental games, such as visual memorization, matching games, etc. train the mind and aid memory by focusing the student’s attention on a specific task.

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How Do I Look Online?

Most young people participate in some form of online communication multiple times a day. Each time someone comments on a post, shares a photo, or writes a tweet, they add to their digital biography. Students rarely ask themselves: What does my digital biography say about me? What kind of person do I seem to be online? Am I proud of my online image?

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It’s Right to Cite

Students today are part of what many people are calling the “copy and paste generation.” Creating and sharing work online is easy; protecting your words and ideas is hard. This depends on students being ethical and fair about giving credit to other people’s words and ideas. Because students conduct much of their research online, it is especially important for them to learn about the plagiarism. Students need to understand the consequences of not giving credit to someone else’s work.

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What’s Fair?

Since most students conduct the majority of their academic research using online resources, it is critical that students understand the pitfalls and risks of plagiarism. Understanding plagiarism and citation can help students answer important questions regarding what they can and cannot use in a school presentation, how to properly cite their sources, and how using something within the school community is different from sharing that same work in a public forum.

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My Footprint

Young students today are active participants in our online world. Students conduct research online; many play online games and visit websites. Students need to understand that they are creating an online profile that accumulates with information over time. Entering their name, birthdate, likes, and dislikes all become part of their online portfolio, or digital footprint.

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