SEATCA 2025 - Southeastern Alberta Teachers' Convention

Grades 1-4 French immersion teachers, struggling readers in French immersion classrooms face unique challenges, especially when learning a second language. In this session, we’ll explore how the brain learns to read and how this understanding can shape our teaching practices. We’ll uncover the overlaps between French and English reading concepts and explore tips to align your literacy instruction with the science of reading.
Through practical examples you’ll discover simple, purposeful strategies that support your struggling readers. Whether you’re short on time, looking to refine your approach or trying to figure out how to meet the number of exposures a struggling reader needs, you’ll leave with actionable ideas and the confidence to make a difference tomorrow.
 

Social Emotional Resources that I Love Session Overview: In today's educational landscape, fostering students' social and emotional well-being is as crucial as their academic success. Join me for an engaging and informative session where we'll explore some of my favourite Social Emotional Learning (SEL) programs, books, and videos that can help you create a supportive and nurturing classroom environment. Whether you're new to SEL or looking to expand your existing toolkit, this session will provide valuable resources and practical strategies to enhance your teaching practice. This session is designed for elementary school educators who are passionate about integrating social and emotional learning into their classrooms. Whether you're a classroom teacher, school counselor, administrator, you'll find valuable insights and practical tools to support your students' social-emotional development. Session Format: Interactive Presentation: Engage with the presenter through a presentation that includes real-life examples, multimedia resources, and interactive discussions. Q&A Session: Participate in a question-and-answer segment to address your specific needs and challenges related to SEL implementation. Resource Sharing: Receive a comprehensive list of recommended SEL programs, books, and videos, along with tips for integrating them into your teaching practice. Takeaways: By the end of this session, you'll walk away with: A deeper understanding of the importance of SEL in education. A toolkit of high-quality SEL resources to enrich your classroom. Practical strategies for fostering a positive and supportive learning environment for your students.

This is a "hands on," beginner ASL course geared toward educators with little or no experience in ASL. We will start with the ABC's and take you to asking and answering questions, playing games, numbers, and more. You will have the benefit of two instructors, one Deaf and one Hearing, who together will take you through accurate signing as well as explain clearly the logic behind the signs. You will leave excited to practice and show off your ASL!

Through modeling and guided practice, explore how integer tiles support math instruction from elementary to junior high.

Did you know you can do so much more than just view curriculum on new.LearnAlberta.ca? This session will explore how you can make new.LearnAlberta.ca work for you. You’ll be guided through new.LearnAlberta.ca where you can view new curriculum implementation supports and find available resources for students, parents and for teachers. Please bring a device to explore new.LearnAlberta.ca.

This session will explore the use of Children's Literature as a vehicle to accomplish PEW outcomes around mental health, skills, and attitudes. In a collaboration with the BEEJ project, the Niwa family, and Medicine Hat College, 4th year education students look to build a stronger, more resilient community through enhanced mental health education. Teachers will be able to look at grade specific unit and lesson plans created by Education students that pair the CASEL framework across five areas of social and emotional competence with physical education and wellness KUSP's in the Alberta curriculum. Education students will also share their anecdotal findings around the execution and implementation of the lesson plans they created. The hope for this session is to empower teachers with ideas, tools, and lessons to help build a resilient child, classroom, and community around mental health education.

Unlock the power of computational thinking for you and your students! Discover how computational thinking can enhance problem-solving skills while connecting with storytelling, nature, art, and more. This session provides a gentle introduction to core concepts found in the new curriculum such as decomposition, abstraction, and algorithms. Through exploring a variety of activities, both plugged-in and unplugged, you’ll learn how to seamlessly incorporate these principles into your classroom regardless of subject or grade level. No prior experience in teaching computer science needed! Please bring a laptop, Chromebook or tablet to this session

This 2 hour session (20 participants) includes visual slide presentations, interactive creative projects, and group discussion/reflection. The creative process can be a tool for cross-curricular or subject focused lesson development, creating arts integrated learning projects, understanding student motivation, and guiding students through critical thinking. The workshop provides each person with a utilitarian sketch book and creative materials, to engage in visual experiments to better understand each step of the creative process. No need to consider yourself an artist to attend!

Everyone has the notion, or I call it the “gumption” to start a fitness journey. In this sessions, you will explore some of the reasons why physical fitness has been put on the back burner! Let’s design together a fitness plan that fits YOUR wellness needs. As a recently retired Grasslands educator/administrator for 35 years, I started my own fitness business that helps clients to maintain their physical fitness. With this extra time in my hands, I have been re-ignited and I would like to share this passion with you. I would like to help YOU to figure out your physical fitness towards wellness!

Teachers who teach a grade 2/3 split/combined meet to plan and discuss teaching the split/combined grades.

Grade 4-6 French immersion teachers, 
Are you looking for practical strategies to help your struggling French immersion readers? This session focuses on three impactful techniques designed to build confidence, eliminate common errors, and boost reading skills in grades 4-6. Learn how to:

1. Address the persistent -ent mistake 
   
2. Unlock decoding success.
   
3. Leverage letter patterns 
   

Each strategy is grounded in real classroom practice and is easy to implement. Walk away with clear, actionable ideas you can use tomorrow to help your students that seem stuck break free from their reading ruts and achieve measurable progress.
 

APPLE Schools (A Project Promoting healthy Living for Everyone in schools) is an innovative school-focused health promotion initiative. It improves the lives of more than 33,000 students annually in over 100 schools across Alberta, British Columbia, Manitoba, and Ontario by improving their healthy eating, physical activity, and mental health habits. Join us for an inspiring session that highlights the innovative efforts of two APPLE Schools implementation sites and the dedicated School Health Facilitators driving positive change. Discover real-life examples of how schools successfully integrate Comprehensive School Health initiatives to create healthier, more active learning environments. Learn how to build excitement and generate buy-in among staff and community members, empowering everyone to play a role in fostering a healthy school culture. The Facilitators will share their experiences, insights, and practical strategies for overcoming challenges and facilitating impactful transformations in your own setting. Get ready to be inspired and equipped with the tools to ignite healthy change in your school community!

Social Emotional Resources that I Love Session Overview: In today's educational landscape, fostering students' social and emotional well-being is as crucial as their academic success. Join me for an engaging and informative session where we'll explore some of my favourite Social Emotional Learning (SEL) programs, books, and videos that can help you create a supportive and nurturing classroom environment. Whether you're new to SEL or looking to expand your existing toolkit, this session will provide valuable resources and practical strategies to enhance your teaching practice. This session is designed for elementary school educators who are passionate about integrating social and emotional learning into their classrooms. Whether you're a classroom teacher, school counselor, administrator, you'll find valuable insights and practical tools to support your students' social-emotional development. Session Format: Interactive Presentation: Engage with the presenter through a presentation that includes real-life examples, multimedia resources, and interactive discussions. Q&A Session: Participate in a question-and-answer segment to address your specific needs and challenges related to SEL implementation. Resource Sharing: Receive a comprehensive list of recommended SEL programs, books, and videos, along with tips for integrating them into your teaching practice. Takeaways: By the end of this session, you'll walk away with: A deeper understanding of the importance of SEL in education. A toolkit of high-quality SEL resources to enrich your classroom. Practical strategies for fostering a positive and supportive learning environment for your students.

This course is geared toward educators with some familiarity with ASL who would like to take it to the next level. After reviewing the basics, we will go deeper into the grammatical and syntactical structure of ASL, directional verbs, locational/spatial organization and narrative organization. Participants will leave this session able to tell a joke or story in ASL.

In this session, we will actively discuss and collaborate on the reasons, methods, timing, and advantages and disadvantages of using integer tiles and manipulatives for teaching in elementary and junior high settings.

This session looks to provide colony teachers with planning ideas and a look at some resources for the new math, science and LA curriculums in Alberta K-6. There will be time made for discussion about the challenges the change of curriculum has brought and ways to ease the workload.

Are you wondering how to bring joy and engagement into the elementary math classroom? This session will provide research-based, engaging and easy to implement numeracy structures aligned to the new Alberta mathematics curriculum. We will speak about our journeys in how we structure our math blocks to include number talks, Guided Math Stations, rich math tasks, math manipulatives, spiralized review of concepts and triangulated assessment data. The presenters will speak about how we have implemented these structures in various Grade 2-Grade 6 classrooms.

Does your school have Micro:bits, but you’re not sure how to use them in your classroom? Strengthen your students’ problem-solving skills and engage creatively with the curriculum with Micro:bits! This session will provide you with the foundational knowledge to help your students code Micro:bit programmable devices with block-based coding. Discover how computational thinking skills such as pattern recognition, algorithm design, and debugging play a crucial role in coding. Learn how to use these devices in cross-curricular projects, get hands-on experience with coding, and walk away with a few project ideas to use in your classroom! A laptop or Chromebook is required for this session.

This is a collaboration opportunity for Colony teachers to sit together and discuss the many different aspects of colony teaching. We will be covering topics such as classroom management, teaching practices, resources, and new curriculum, all from the unique perspective of a colony educator.

Grade Three Teachers will be meeting in collaborative teams to examine, explore and deconstruct our new language arts and social studies curriculum. Our focus will be in discussing best practices, sharing ideas and lessons and searching for new resources. We will also look at the new social studies curriculum, discuss ways to implement, how we can use what we already have and search for and share new resources. Attendees are encouraged to bring their own planning documents, devices and to attend with colleagues that they can collaborate with. This is a work/sharing session, not a formal presentation of information.

Join us for an overview of the Layers of Writing graphic! During this session, we will share the research pertaining to the layers, the principles that can guide how we structure our programs, and how the writing process can help situate writing instruction in a purposeful environment. If time permits, we will share simple, easy to implement, classroom practices that support writing instruction.

Does your school have robots but you’re not sure how to use them in your classroom? Strengthen your students’ problem-solving skills and engage creatively with the curriculum through robotic exploration! This session will provide you with the foundational knowledge to help your students code a robot through block-based coding. Learn how computational thinking skills such as pattern recognition, algorithm design, and debugging are necessary when coding and how to connect robotics to curricular concepts in any subject. Get hands-on experience with a robot and walk away with a few project ideas to use in your classroom! The skills learned in this workshop will be transferrable to whatever robots your school has access to. Devices will be supplied for this session.