MPTCA 2025

Find ways to charge your battery as an educator by incorporating mindfulness and social-emotional learning into the classroom environment! We will explore the proven scientific evidence, anecdotes, and testimonials about how and why bringing mindfulness and SEL into your daily routines/classroom environments is beneficial to you and your student's mental, emotional, and physical health. Simple and easy-to-use tips, techniques, and methods will be explored, and a handout will be provided, where you will then be able to practice them in the session and conveniently incorporate Mindfulness and Social Emotional Learning strategies into your daily life and classroom! We will end the session with a longer, relaxing group mindfulness session/reflection to send you blissfully on your way! All experiences are welcome!

Session Objectives:
1. Improve a sense of overall awareness by reflecting on personal wellness areas
2. Explore SEL and Mindfulness Techniques as they apply to wellness personally, professionally and in the classroom
3. Set goals and practice and integrate SEL/Mindfulness Techniques into daily and classroom routines

Do you struggle engaging your students with the topics of government and economics? Want your students to think critically and build skills? This session will walk you through a variety of different tasks that can be interactive, develop critical thinking skills, work to apply knowledge and interpret a variety of sources. Tasks range from government simulations, YCJA scenarios and trials, cross curricular ELA texts/resources, economic simulations, videos to support learning, propaganda, etc.

Session Objectives:
1. Interactive Activities (Government and YCJA)
2. Cross curricular resources
3. Economic Simulations

Are you struggling to develop your student s academic social studies writing skills? This is the session for you! We will be focusing on paragraph structure building towards essay writing and interpreting sources and developing critical written responses leading to the source analysis. The scope and sequence from grade 7 to high school written tasks will be examined. We will be providing powerpoint lessons, tasks, templates and exemplars for a variety of different grades and abilities.

Session Objectives:
1. Academic social studies paragraph writing
2. Essay Writing
3. Critical written response to sources

Want to bring conflict and military history to life in your classroom? Want your students to connect to different challenges associated with people's experiences with conflict? Want your students to think critically and build skills? We will be looking at a variety of different conflicts connected to the curriculum (EG: War of 1812, Conquest of the Americas, Remembrance Day, etc.) in social studies as well as a variety of different ELA texts that have conflict as a theme (EG: The Sniper, War Poetry, songs connected to war and peace, etc.). Students get to explore and understand situations where individuals are interacting with conflict and war and the consequences individually and for society. There are many connections to be made to other times in world history to allow students to critically think about the movement of peoples. You will walk away with the complete lessons, activities, projects and resources.

Session Objectives:
1. Social studies learning tasks connected to conflict/war
2. Language Arts texts connected to the themes/topics of conflict war
3. Engaging Projects