Try as we may, we just can’t get enough of seasonal books. Do you have the same seasonal-book-buying affliction? One of the ways I love using seasonal books is in a daily countdown to the holiday. Here’s how we count down to Halloween with a spooky read every day! We
How you start your day is often how you live your life. –Louise Hay Beginnings matter. What happens before the first bell even rings has a huge impact on the outcome of the entire day. The tone of the day is established in the first 20 minutes of the day.
I sat down to type up what I did the first week of 2nd grade, but a few thousand words later, I’d only covered the first day! So it seemed like we probably needed 2 posts on that topic. If you want to know how I organized the first DAY
When Heidi and I were both teaching 2nd grade, we had a dream. We had a dream of THE IDEAL WORD STUDY PROGRAM. We both feel like we had some really solid practices in place for teaching phonics and spelling. But we had complaints about our cobbled together word study
Back-to-school is the worst of times. It’s so stressful and exhausting (seriously it’s so, so tiring!). But it’s also the best of times! The feeling of a new beginning is absolutely exhilarating. I love that fresh start, where everything is possible and I haven’t screwed up…yet! I may be in
Hi teacher friends! We wanted to alert you of some upcoming free professional development opportunities that we’re hosting in the coming weeks. You’re invited to join us to learn about Unlocking the Power of Fluency for your students. This is a free, live training we will be offering on a
Do you do Daily 5? It was a total game changer for my daily schedule! You can read more about how I manage Daily 5 here. My students have a few tasks to do every day for the Word Work station of Daily 5. First, they do their word sort.
What’s better than relaxing with a great book in the summer? How about THREE great books?! Join us for our Summer Book Club! We’ll doing a little light reading, some thoughtful thinking, and a lot of fun discussion. After some suggestions, we’ve selected three great reads that we can’t wait to dive
“Mom wants answers after child with ADHD receives ‘Least Likely to Pay Attention’ award.” That was in my newsfeed the other day. It’s easy to look at a story like that and think the teacher is incredibly cruel. And though it seems so obvious that this was a terrible, terrible idea,
I first saw Anne of Green Gables when I was 8. You know the 80s mini-series from Canada with Megan Follows and (the all-time best TV crush) Jonathan Crombie??? I fell in love from the first scene with Anne reciting poetry to herself as she walks through the woods. Tell
There are some common mistakes that teachers make when they embark on teaching oral reading fluency. I’ve made some of these mistakes myself. But we hope to save you from making the same mistakes and have some idea for you of what to do instead. Mistake #1: Using ONLY 1 minute timed
Around here at Second Story Window, there’s not much we love more than Christmas picture books! Today we’re sharing some of our favorite versions of the 12 days of Christmas. Our other Christmas books posts have narrowed our recommendations down to our top 5, but there are just too
