School and the City

I was shocked to find out that most of my students had never read A Bad Case of Stripes ! It’s usually a back to school book for me, but pulling it out in February to help us talk about empathy and compassion was perfect!  I tied it in to our reading skill - comparing perspectives - and then we had a class meeting to reflect on what makes each of us unique and why that’s so important.  To take it a step further, students wrote about something that makes them unique. I snapped some quick pics and printed them on computer paper for students to color over. It looks great in the hallway!  Want this writing template? Simply join my email list (no spam - I promise!) and I'll send the freebie your way immediately!  Send it please! Powered By ConvertKit Pin me!

We recently finished one of my favorite units: pollution and conservation. Over the years I've gathered ideas and resources that I thought you may be able to use to freshen up your own science unit! 1. READ Integrate your new topics into your literacy block. There are SO MANY wonderful options out there - both fiction and nonfiction - that you can use to teach reading skills while also building background knowledge for your students. I used some Scholastic Reading Club points and my public library to stock up on texts related to our unit. Favorite fiction: The Wump World Favorite nonfiction(ish): The Adventures of a Plastic Bottle Based on a true story: The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind You can find all of the above and the rest of my favorites linked on my Amazon list   under "Conservation Books." 2. EXPERIMENT A coworker suggested this idea and I am going to use it EVERY YEAR from now on. For one day only, I hid the trash cans in my room. Eac...

Opinion writing is my favorite! There are SO MANY fun ways to practice forming and supporting opinions. I've done candy wars, Chandra's sweet vs. sour , and other fun topics. However, writing data has shown my grade level that are students are showing weakness in supporting opinions with examples and citing text-evidence. We turned to one of our favorite resources for nonfiction texts - ReadWorks.org . ReadWorks is free for educators, so if you don't have an account yet, make one RIGHT NOW. (Seriously, now!) So we picked some articles from ReadWorks that could provide some prompts for our opinion writing unit. We let our students choose from 4 prompts: Should we have year-round school? Should students wear uniforms? Should people be allowed to own exotic pets? Should dogs work? After they chose their topics, I gave them the corresponding article(s) from ReadWorks. I gave them time to sit with students that had chosen the same topic to read and discuss the texts...

As long as I've been a teacher, I've had parents ask me for book suggestions. I struggle the most with suggesting books for advanced readers. So many popular book series are set in middle school and contain content that I consider inappropriate for my elementary students. My third graders don't need to be reading about girlfriends/boyfriends, over the top violence, any reference to alcohol or illegal substances, or foul language. In order to be able to suggest books to parents that are academically challenging yet age-appropriate, I've compiled this list with the help of Scholastic Book Wizard , Common Sense Media , GoodReads , and some teacher friends on Instagram . I hope it helps you out! Level P: Wayside School series Rescue Princesses series Puppy Patrol series Level Q: American Girl Doll series Who Is...? / What Is...? series Little House series Level R: I Survived... series E.B. White books (Charlotte's Web, Stuart Little...) Y...

There are so many professional resources out there for teachers to use to grow their practices, but it's so hard to know where to invest your time and money. I plan to honestly review some popular resources, and I'm starting with one of my favorites: The Reading Strategies Book by Jennifer Serravallo.  The book is organized into 13 chapters, each named with a reading goal, beginning with fluency, moving towards comprehension of fiction and nonfiction, and ending with writing about reading.  Pros : Strategies are for reading levels A to Z. Each goal has its own super-organized table of contents, ordered by increasing reading level. Each page is set up the same way. Each page tells relevant reading levels and text types are appropriate to be used with the strategy, which smaller skills can be tied in, and additional tips. Servallo even gives you child-appropriate language and prompts to use when teaching.  Each page provides some sort of visual aid, whe...

I posted an image on Instagram recently and got a huge response that I wasn't expecting.  We're all having the same problem, right? I'm glad it's not just me!  If your students are anything like mine, they can tell you what makes a great sentence. They can tell you that it starts with a capital letter, ends with some type of punctuation, has correct spelling and neat handwriting... but they're not doing that in their own writing.  So they have the knowledge, and they also have the application skills. If I ask them how their sentence is looking, they can quickly notice and correct their mistakes.  Apparently, writing with correct conventions hasn't become a habit. I'm not sure if that's related to effort... or what.  So my thought was that if it's related to effort and motivation, what can I do to make my students care more? We talked about what it means to be an author and when we will need to use writing in real life (aka ...

Hey teacher. You're incredible. Do you have a variety of flexible seating options for students to choose from? You're a great teacher. Do you [still] have desks? You're a great teacher, too. The seating options we provide our students certainly impact students' learning environments, but they do not define you as a teacher. Flexible seating is amazing. Search #flexibleseatingclassroom on Instagram, and you'll find more than 5,000 images of gorgeous, modern classrooms. Students are working in spaces that are comfortable for them: couches, bean bags, picnic tables, and so on. Is it for me? No.  It's just not. As a teacher, I like order, and clean lines, and structure. As a student, I like having a spot to call "mine" that I can return to at any time for a feeling of comfort and security. The closest I ever got to flexible seating was when I swapped to tables for a few years. This gave students the ability to choose their own places...