Agree or Disagree? September is the new January! For me, this is definitely TRUE. I always feel energized and inspired to start fresh come September, even in the years when I haven’t been teaching. It just feels like a fresh start, a perfect time to set goals and make changes. In many ways, I find I’m…
Blog
1 Easy Trick to Simplify Word Sorting
Aren’t we all looking for a way to simplify the management of 25+ students and all their little word sort cards each week? A reader told us this tip a few years ago and we couldn’t believe how simple and easy it was. It’s a CRAYON. Here’s what you do… Buy a big box of…
Join Us on Facebook!
We’ve created a fun community for teachers to gather and collaborate on Facebook. We’d love to have you join us. We have some fun things planned including special daily deals for the month of June! Click here to join the Facebook group.
One Giant Leap (Day)!
There's something just so fun about leap day. I think it must be the novelty of a day that only happens every 4 years and the feeling that you get a bonus day! My half birthday falls on leap day so I always feel a little extra special that day. We wanted to create a…
Easy Class Parties
CLASS PARTY. The words sometimes strike fear in the heart of a teacher, right? As if we don’t already have enough to do, we have to plan a class party too? Oh the chaos! But it turns out it’s possible to put together a simple party, devoid of chaos, that’s still tons of fun! Whether…
10 Ways to Revitalize Your Classroom in the New Year
My favorite part about the new year is that it feels like a second chance at a fresh start with your class! Here are some ideas and tips to inspire you to take this opportunity to revitalize your classroom! 1. Sharpen your procedures Doesn’t it sometimes feel like you come back from winter break and your kids…
Halloween Fun: Carving Out Time to Learn
We have a fun new bundle of Halloween activities for your little spooks! It’s important to us that when we make something seasonal that it’s both fun AND meaningful and we’ve worked hard to achieve that with these activities. They’re also differentiated so should be appropriate for grades 1-4! The first activity in the bundle…
Back-to-School: Guided Discovery
Do you know The First Six Weeks of School by Paula Denton and Roxann Kriete? I love this book! I got it early in my teaching career and it’s one of the few books that I pulled out to reference EVERY YEAR! The main philosophy of this book is that taking time to shape the…
A Teacher’s Guide to Fluency
For a long time, fluency was the forgotten component of reading instruction. I know it never came up in my college courses! But in the last 10 years or so, the view has shifted. Fluency has come to be recognized as a vital skill in developing proficient readers. For the purposes of this post, when…
Getting the Most Out of Fluency Homework
Timed, repeated readings with feedback are one of the best ways to improve students’ reading fluency. Repeated reading is just what it sounds like–the student is rereading the same passage multiple times. The number of times depends on the situation, but 3-4 times is a good average. The student is timed reading aloud for 1…
