School and the City

Animal research projects are the way to go when it comes to teaching informational writing. Kids LOVE animals and have so much fun learning and writing about them. But teaching writing is hard. I feel ya. My team felt is was especially hard to teach informational writing including the need for conducting research. That's A LOT for a 3rd grader, y'all! After some trial and error, I've developed templates to use with my students to walk them through the informational writing process. Research We start with a recording sheet to help students track and organize information as they research. I model this for students first. I show them how to read an article and record the information in appropropriate sections. I like to use bullet points because it helps eliminate students copying sentences word for word. This takes a lot of modeling and a lot of practice! It definitely takes a few days, at least, for students to successfully complete thei...

I'm sure many of you agree with me when I say I have a love/hate relationship with bulletin boards. I don't know about you, but I feel a lot of pressure to make my bulletin boards show work that is attractive yet rigorous! (Tell me I'm not alone!) To gear all of us up for January/February bulletin boards, I've collected a few of my favorites to share with you. PENGUINS Who doesn't love penguins? I typically start my informational writing unit with penguin research reports. We do some shared research and shared writing, then students do their own research on a chosen species of penguins. The end project is adorable. I decided to simplify the process a little bit this year by creating a writing template for the penguin belly, which you can grab for free  in my  VIP Free Resource Library .  The freebie also shows how I make the tracers for the penguin body. (Not yet a VIP? Join  here , and the password will immediately be sent straight to your email i...

It's that time of year, y'all! *finally* Time for students to reflect on their year of experiences while you start packing up your classroom. Whew! Exciting, but hectic!  One of my favorite projects for the last week or two of school is this  newspaper creative writing task .  It's a meaningful, creative writing activity for the end of the year! Students use all those writing skills they learned throughout the year to write about how they feel about the end of the year, their favorite memories, and advice for next year's students. We all have standards that state something about "using standard conventions of English" and "with the support of an adult, publish a writing piece." This is a great end-of-year assessment tool to see how much your students have grown in their writing abilities. Copy one of the pages as a work sample, if you need one! Most importantly, it's also a fun way for our students to "publis...

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...

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 ...

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'm really trying to be better about holding writing conferences this year. These simple questions have completely changed the quality of my writing conferences: 🔹What did you write about? Why? 🔹What was the easiest part of your writing process? 🔹What was the most challenging part? I've found students to be very open and honest. It's helped me build relationships and obtain valuable insight. It makes note-taking easy! As for feedback, I'm just using sticky notes. It's easy, fast, and they stick right in students' notebooks! For now, I'm making a "Glow" sticky note and a "Grow" sticky note. This keeps conferences short and sweet, just like this blog post. ;) If you're looking for a conference log, I have one that you can download for free in my TPT store!  Happy conferring!  Pin me!

So you raided the Target Dollar Spot and stocked up on some blank books for your classroom. Now what? I love the blank books almost as much as my students do. I use them for almost every final draft writing project, and my students get so excited about "publishing" books. It truly increases motivation and engagement, and I always love the final products! First I created some blank, lined templates with lines of various sizes. (Why doesn't Target start making LINED books??) These can be used for anything and everything! With these templates, I usually pre-cut them for my students quickly with my paper cutter. It only takes a moment and cuts down on distractions. Want these templates delivered to your inbox for FREE? You got it!  Then I got excited and wanted to use blank books for ALL THE THINGS. My second graders needed some help with organizing their books and making them neat, so I created some templates. Here are a few templates that I have created an...