It’s Sunday night, and as you eat dinner your mind drifts to the stack of papers on your desk that need to be graded, the emails from parents waiting in your inbox, and your lesson plan for tomorrow morning that could use another glance. You have to be at school at 7 am, and you groan when you count the few hours between now and then. 

Sound familiar? Whether you call it the Sunday blues, Sunday anxiety, or the Sunday scaries, the fact is that Sunday night is filled with stress and worry for 80% of professionals, according to a LinkedIn survey. These Sunday scary feelings often come from one of two places:

• Dread about the work week ahead and upcoming tasks, or
• Regret over how the weekend was spent and things that did not get done

Both feelings ultimately come from a place of anxiety, and this anxiety

It may be a constantly changing world for our students, but one thing is for certain: Being kind is just as important now as ever before. Send students the message that kindness is a top priority—and honor the reality that showing it can take courage, creativity, and persistence—by including books about it in your curriculum. Here are 23 of our favorite kindness books for the classroom.

(Just a heads up, WeAreTeachers may collect a share of sales from the links on this page. We only recommend items our team loves!)

1. Boo Who? by Ben Clanton (Pre-K–1)

It can be hard to find ways to include someone new—especially when that someone is invisible—but it’s worth the effort. Simple and sweet, it’s easy for kids to “see” the possible connections between this story and their own lives.

Buy it: Boo Who? on Amazon

2. What Does It Mean To Be Kind?

PBL Spotlight: 5th Grade Restaurant Math Tipping Guide

by Drew Perkins, Director of TeachThought PD

Every year since their kindergarten years I have extended my offer to teachers of my daughters to help out in any way they might find useful. Some of them have taken me up on my offer and asked me to chaperone a field trip or help with some minor classroom activities on special occasions, and I was happy to help.

But I was ecstatic in 2017, when my oldest daughter’s 5th-grade teacher, Kristen Rowling (now Taylor) asked me to collaborate on some PBL planning and co-teaching. What we came up with together was a relatively short project that incorporated an authentic audience and a product that helped her contextualize a need to learn how to mathematically work with decimals and percentages in meaningful ways.

This project isn’t meant to serve as an exemplar–for that please

Before the pandemic, the move to test-optional admissions was already gathering steam as concerns mounted over the fact that wealthier students could hire tutors, take the tests multiple times and post higher scores. Other critics said that the paperwork to waive testing fees was a barrier for many low-income students. Then, during the pandemic, it became nearly impossible for students to sit for exams and the vast majority of colleges eliminated testing requirements. Some have since restored them, but many haven’t.

Slay’s research is still ongoing, and she presented her preliminary findings at the 2022 annual conference of the Association For Education Finance & Policy. When I interviewed her in October 2022, she and her research team had interviewed 22 admissions officers from 16 colleges and universities. All were four-year institutions, but they ranged from public to private, large to small, and religious to nonreligious. Four of the colleges

Right-wing Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) claimed a debate audience burst into laughter during one of his answers last week because college students in the crowd were fed “leftist propaganda.”

Someone dared to “let in” college students to watch the televised debate at Marquette University last Thursday in Milwaukee, Johnson complained Sunday to Fox News host Brian Kilmeade.

“My guess … college students” in the crowd laughed at him, Johnson said.

“Let’s face it, our colleges today aren’t exactly teaching history. They’re really not talking about the relevant things that students really oughta learn in college,” Johnson continued. “They’re being taught leftist propaganda.”

The debate audience burst out laughing when Johnson claimed at one point that he had been “set up” by the FBI.

Johnson was responding to an attack by his Democratic opponent Mandela Barnes, Wisconsin’s lieutenant governor, who pointed out that the senator was warned by the FBI in

posted on September 7, 2022
News

Dear teachers,

You can take student motivation off your to-do list this year, because Khan Academy’s LearnStorm is back and better than ever. LearnStorm will help you boost engagement and build community in your classroom all year long! You can also sign your class up for the chance to win prizes in the fall as part of Khan Academy’s National LearnStorm Challenge!

Our founder and CEO, Sal Khan, has a message for teachers who are wondering why they should use LearnStorm in the classroom:

Measure mastery learning with the LearnStorm tracker

In addition to being available year-round for teachers worldwide, the LearnStorm tracker now not only tracks whether students are completing assignments, but whether they have actually mastered the concepts. This new update encourages deeper learning by rewarding mastery level-ups to “familiar” or higher. With LearnStorm, teachers can help students build a growth

Designed with the whole child in mind, cannabis classroom activities from Ask, Listen, Learn focus on how kids interact with society and how society influences their behavior. Through these informative and engaging drug prevention activities for middle school, students will:

• Address the dangers and effects of underage cannabis use on the developing brain, both short- and long-term, while collaborating on refusal and exit strategies for peer pressure. 
• Separate facts from fiction through class activities, scientific research, and meaningful peer discussion.
• Explore the evolution of federal and state regulations, engage in meaningful debate as they develop their personal ideas and beliefs, then assume the role of an elected official and create their own mock legislation.

Through our partnership with Ask, Listen, Learn, we help students uncover the science behind how alcohol and cannabis affect developing brains, bodies, and behavior. With these prevention resources, both educators and families can equip students

There’s no better time to spark students’ interest in government and politics than election season, when the political climate provides learning opportunities for students to see the real-world applications of class topics. Fostering students’ civic knowledge not only gives them context for world news, but ultimately turns young people into informed and engaged citizens who will effectively elicit change in their communities and beyond. 

Whether you’re looking for politics and government lesson plans for high school, activities to supplement your high school civics curriculum, or current events projects to encourage student discussion, these resources will help you teach our future changemakers. 

12 High School Civics Resources

From lessons on the structures and processes of the U.S. government to discussions on current events and social issues, spark student engagement in civics with these resources.

Resources on the U.S. Constitution and government functions

United States Civics and Government Pre-Test by Samantha in

We don’t need to talk about how we’re in a historic teacher shortage or why talented teachers are leaving, so I’ll skip over all of that.

I want to talk about how done I am with the armchair quarterbacks of the teaching world.

Who are the armchair quarterbacks?

Traditional armchair quarterbacks are people who are not NFL players, but who readily offer their criticism of them from the armchair of their couch as a spectator. In the education world, they’re people who have never taught or maybe taught for a handful of years a long time ago, but who definitely haven’t been teaching in the last two years.

And somehow, despite this lack of experience and training, they know exactly how teachers should be doing their jobs. They know what’s appropriate—not just for their child but for every child in every classroom. They know how much homework, classwork, tests,