SEATCA 2025 - Southeastern Alberta Teachers' Convention

Are you ready to transform your school into a haven of mental wellness and inclusivity? Join us for an inspiring and interactive workshop designed to equip educators with the essential tools and strategies to promote mental health and reduce stigma among students. In this session, Andrea Paquette, President and Co-Founder of the Stigma-Free Mental Health Society, will introduce you to the comprehensive Stigma-Free School Program, which encompasses five key components: 1. Student Mental Health Toolkit: Discover a rich repository of resources, including lesson plans, activities, videos, and more, tailored to enhance students' mental health education. 2. Live Personal Story Virtual Presentations: Experience the power of lived experiences through our engaging virtual presentations. 3. Pro-D Offerings: Enhance your professional development with our targeted sessions aimed at equipping educators with the latest strategies and insights on mental health education. 4. Stigma-Free Clubs: Learn how to establish and support student-led clubs dedicated to promoting mental health awareness and reducing stigma within the school community. 5. Educator's Peer Support Training: Gain access to peer support training tailored specifically for educators. This training empowers you to support your colleagues and create a network of mental health champions within your school. By attending this workshop, you will gain practical tools and insights to make a lasting impact on your students' mental well-being. Don't miss this opportunity to join a movement towards a stigma-free educational environment. Together, we can create schools where every student feels supported, understood, and empowered.

Ever wonder why so many children with ADHD struggle with tasks like planning, organization, and self-control, and feel unsure how to support them? As a classroom teacher, I saw these challenges in many students and became even more invested in understanding them when both of my own children were diagnosed with ADHD. In this engaging session, we’ll dive into the critical connection between ADHD and executive functioning (EF), focusing on essential skills such as response inhibition, working memory, emotional control, flexible thinking, sustained attention, task initiation, planning and prioritizing, organizing, time management and goal-directed persistence. You'll leave with practical strategies that can help not only children with ADHD but any student struggling with EF skills and gain the insights and tools you need to help all learners succeed both at home and in the classroom.

Students require specialized skills to be able to cope with the demands of disciplinary text. As students move up in secondary grades, the language of the texts they engage with becomes more specialized and precise, and the language more academic. Academic vocabulary (often referred to as Tier 2 Academic Words) is problematic for students to master, as academic vocabulary can take on dramatically different meanings depending on the usage. As the knowledge students engage with becomes more formalized and complex, so too do the patterns of language that construct that knowledge. This session will take a look at patterns of language and some of the problems with academic vocabulary. Teachers will come away with practical and useful tools that students can use to visualize, organize and structure their thinking to improve their reading, writing and communicating across all subject areas.

Have you ever wondered what teaching on a Hutterite Colony is like? Are you curious about what teaching in a one room school house in 2025 is all about? If you are Colony curious, or have questions about what teaching or subbing at a colony school, this session if for you.

In our time together, Rod will provide examples of teaching methods along with visual resources to make learning sky science both memorable and effective. We will become aquainted with space, its size and scale, its contents and our place in the observable universe. Astronomy fills our every day culture. We actually know more astronomy than we realize and Rod will uncover these amazing cultural touchstones. For example, how the arctic gets its name, what the "dog days of summer" really means, or what does a zoo have in common with the zodiac? We will use visuals, hands on demonstrations as well as a PowerPoint presentation.

Alberta Health Services health professionals will discuss vaping and nicotine pouch use amongst youth. Participants will learn: • Trends in and prevalence rates of e-cigarette use for school aged youth in Alberta • Best practices for preventing nicotine use • An overview on nicotine pouches • Marketing tactics targeting youth • Grade appropriate prevention education for schools • A summary of available resources for students and teachers to prevent and reduce nicotine use by young people

Teaching in a tech free environment can be a challenge. Discover some useful tools to organize and run your multi-graded colony classroom.

Finding Nemo. How to Train Your Dragon. Apollo 13. There are big ideas and big moments in big movies: ideas that can pinpoint key instances of learning and transfer. We’ll examine these moments (and more) and bridge them into classroom learning. Teachers will learn about transfer theory and ways to use movies to explicitly teach for transfer of understanding. This session includes a support package of takeaways, teaching tips, and graphic organizers teachers can use in their classrooms.

Did you know that experts like Joan Sedita (author of The Writing Rope) recommend spending 40% of writing instruction on the stage of rewriting and revision? In spite of its importance, this crucial step often gets the least amount of attention—largely because many students aren’t sure how to revise effectively or independently. In this session, we’ll dive into practical, easy-to-apply strategies to help your students approach the revision stage with more creativity and confidence. Using techniques from The Writing Revolution, such as sentence expansion, sentence combining, and adding appositives, you'll learn ways to make both drafting and revising more clear and engaging for your students. You’ll also discover strategies for fostering collaboration, helping students work together to improve each other’s writing. By the end of our session, you'll be equipped with specific feedback techniques and a toolkit of revision strategies to help your students confidently revise both their writing and the writing of their peers!

Join Ever Active Schools as we explore ways to foster inclusivity, enrich learning, and promote a global perspective within your physical education program. This session samples activities from International Games, a resource featuring lesson plans from 9 countries. Learn the process used to develop the student-led resource, and spark ideas for how to celebrate the unique cultures of your school community.

The ability to read and summarize a text is an essential skill. A good summary needs to do more than pick out the big ideas and simplify the text. A good summary helps students to identify and analyze key points in the text and then relate those points to the overall structure of the text. Teaching summarization that is linked to text-structure improves both the quality of the written summaries and students’ overall comprehension of the text. Join Dr. Hartson to explore this powerful method of summarizing text. You’ll walk away with examples, graphic organizers, and materials you can use in your class tomorrow.