School and the City

This year, I'm working as a reading coach and interventionist. I love teaching phonics all day long and getting to work with different grade levels. Throughout the years, I've developed favorite phonics supplies, of course. I've also changed my practice a lot due to recent professional learning. If I had to pick my top must-have supplies for teaching phonics, these would be them. You can find all of these on Amazon for easy shopping! Sound Boxes and Chips Chips, or some sort of manipulative, are a must for orthographic mapping. I've used cubes, mini erasers, game pieces... Bingo chips are my favorite because of their size and how easily they slide. I make my own sound boxes, but I love this set that I found on Amazon. It's affordable and serves as a great scaffold for your young students. Letters, Letters, Letters! This seems obvious, but yes, you need a LOT of letters to give students the opportunity to have hands-on experiences man...

Once upon a time, when I first started teaching, I started building my classroom library.  I gathered books from retiring teachers and Goodwill. Throughout my career, I've grown my library by using Scholastic Book Club points, visiting Scholastic Warehouse sales, and shopping for specific series lots on eBay. The bins are from Dollar Tree, and they've held up well!  I must say - I'm super proud of my library!  My first school required me to have my library sorted by guided reading level. I get that! Students, in order to improve reading skills, should be reading books on or slightly above their instructional reading levels.  My library looked like this for six years... until now.  I noticed this year especially that my students rarely visited my classroom library unless I forced them to "book shop." They LOVE reading on Epic! where they can easily search and sort by categories.  Plus, as a grow as a teacher, I've learned that ...

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!

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 receive a lot of questions about how I run my literacy block. At my school, our schedule is blocked out, but I have freedom to arrange my own blocks (if that makes sense). So my literacy block is 9:40 - 11:15, and this is what I've decided to do with it: We start right away with our minilesson. Students are fresh from recess and eat their snacks while I read and model strategies. From there, students move into their Daily 5 rotations. (Our school using CAFE & Daily 5, but I don't have time to rotate students through 5 stations daily, so I make sure some aspects of Daily 5 are integrated throughout the day!) I keep this as simple as possible. I occasionally change it up, but rarely! I have a chart in my room so students know exactly what their options are for each rotation. During this time, I pull small groups. You may notice I do not include myself as a rotation. I do this in order to provide flexibility for myself. Sometimes, I don't need to ...

I was inspired by Hope , Mary , and many others to finally host a classroom BOOK TASTING!  On Friday afternoons, I usually coteach a STEAM lesson with a coworker. However, during Read Across America week earlier this month, we decided to do a book tasting instead of STEAM.  I collected a wide variety of books to appeal to students with varied interests. I tried to stay away from series that many of them are already familiar with.  We set the scene with some cheap tablecloths, battery-powered candles, dim lighting, and Italian music.  Most of my materials, including the placemats and bookmarks, came from Joanne from Head Over Heels for Teaching .  I ended up making my own menu to make it really simple for my second graders. You can download it for free in my VIP Free Resource Library . Not yet a member? Join here .  Wanting to buy some decor for your book tasting? I spent less than $20 on {reusable} mat...

Yesterday I posted an Instagram story about how I recorded myself reading one of our social studies readers to turn it into an option for my "Listen to Reading" Daily 5 center. I wanted to give my students more options during that station time, and I am always trying to integrate social studies and science into our literacy block!  I received so many questions about how I did it, so here's a detailed post to show you just how EASY it is!  I plan to make these for all of my social studies and science readers, but the options are truly endless. You can do this with any books or book sets that you have on hand in your classroom.  I used the Voice Memos app on my iPhone to record the book. It was very easy to trim and alter if needed, and the quality is good! Best of all, it's an app that's already on your iPhone so it's totally free! I recorded the entire book, then I recorded individual chapters, just to give my students options.  ...

This year was my fourth time around teaching text features , and I decided that it was an area that I could show improvement. I think text features are a difficult concept for young students to learn because it's typically rote memorization of a lot of funny words that they don't understand the importance of.  This year has been the fastest my students have ever learned the names of text features, and they know how to use them, too.  First of all, I have seen anchor charts on Pinterest where a teacher tears apart a worn-out nonfiction book and uses pieces of it to create a visual reference for text features. I loved the idea of that, but it was a LOT of work and I didn't want to have to do it year after year. I spent an afternoon cutting apart a book and some magazines and gluing pieces on a piece of chart paper. Then I took that baby down the hall to the place where the magic happens: the teacher workroom. Because that's where the laminator i...