Storytelling activities not only build imagination and creativity, but they can be a beneficial learning tool too! Great for the classroom.
Looking for esl task cards to use with your english language learners? Try these picture cards that are perfect for quick and effective language practice!
Paragraph writing is a big challenge for many students. This post includes a step-by-step method to help your students write great paragraphs in no time.
Looking for unique post-reading activities to inspire students and provide a sample of their analytical skills? Find high-interest strategies for secondary.
Each classroom brings students of multiple learning styles and backgrounds. It is our job to provide opportunities that reach all of the many different learning styles that come to us. For this reason, it is
If your non-English speaking students aren't ready to do the regular class work, what should you have them do instead? This handy tool can help.
Interested in using anchor charts with older students? Read about benefits, best practices, and materials to make the experience a success.
Learn which strategies to use with students who are engaging in escape or task avoidance behaviors in special education classes.
Do you want your students to love writing? Get tips on how to create a classroom writing center that your students will WANT to go to!
Blank books provide a great way to encourage kids to write. Here are 3 easy ways to assemble blank books for your writing center, literacy center, and beyond.
Simple tips for improving writing in your second or third grade classroom. These tips are a must if you want better writers!
I love my job. I really, really do! One of the favorite parts about my job is that I get to network with a whole bunch of very talented teachers. I love hearing about and seeing them implement creative strategies to improve student learning. During the past several years, many of our local school districts have focused on improving writing instruction. All of […]
Get organized with a daily and weekly ELA plan so that you feel confident and prepared. Planning the structure of a class period varies by unit. Start here!
Ring in the new year with these January Writing Prompts! Fun, educational, and imagination building ideas for Opinion, Narrative, and Informative writing.
We've all used exit tickets in our classroom for informal assessment, but sometimes it can become boring. Read this post to get exit ticket ideas on how you can engage students with exit slips and still assess your students!
Use a sound wall in your kindergarten classroom with these tips, ideas, and suggestions about using a sound wall in kindergarten!
There's a lot of ground to cover when you teach creative narrative writing. Here are 5 creative narrative mini-lessons you should be sure to use!
These printable cutting practice strips are an easy way to help your young learners work on their fine motor and cutting skills. Find more Cutting Practice Packs HERE. *The free download button can be found at the END of this post. Printable Cutting Practice Strips You’ll find horizontal lines, vertical lines, zigzag lines, and ... Read More about Printable Cutting Practice Strips
teaching ideas, upper elementary classroom ideas, reading ideas,resources for the upper elementary classroom, teaching grammar, graphic organizers
Morphology walls are a great tool in 4th and 5th grade classrooms! Read more and sign up for free posters to make your own morphology wall!
Get an outline for teaching all the reading and writing standards in your Middle School ELA class.
When I think about student writing, one of the most difficult concepts to teach is sentence fluency. Much of excelling at fluent writing revolves around students’ background with literacy. Certainly,...
Looking for effective classroom management policies and procedures for secondary classrooms? Here are 5 key starting points!
Our Class is a Family is simply an amazing book to start or end school year. It is perfectly suited to help build positive classroom environment and reinforce an important message of care and respect. Make your classroom feel like home with the help of reading this cute book and further promote its message with […]
hold students accountable while they independently read with these easy to implement reading tips and tricks and strategies
Free reading comprehension passages for grades 2 - 3
No more boring book reports! Check out 26+ FUN, creative and unique book report ideas and free printable projects too!
Need fun activities to teach the scientific method? Check out these ideas to use with your science students in grades 4 5 6.
Students come to us on all different levels, which can be a challenge- 3 great ideas on how to teach a mutli-level class.
Are your students disinterested and tired of the traditional ways of learning characterization? Have you been searching for a really fun, student-centered, interactive way to eliminate their boredom? Well, look no further! I present to you a wonderful student-collaboration activity that will get your students involved and excited for a character analysis for any novel, […]
Writing instruction often fits into a small corner of the day. This makes it so challenging to find time to teach grammar, spelling, punctuation, and all the other foundational skills students need to be more effective writers. While working through the writing process is an important piece of writing instruction, many
In upper grade classrooms, students spend a great deal of time responding to the texts they read. Over the years I have found that no matter what grade level I teach, students have a difficult time writing thorough and meaningful reading responses. At the start of every year my students need quite a bit of guidance when writing their responses. One of the best ways that I have found to teach students to write meaningful responses is by providing them with sentence frames. I like to encourage students to follow three simple steps when writing reading responses, each with sentence frames and prompts to use: Step 1: What did you read? While reading... In chapter __ of... On page __ of... During today's reading of... Step 2: What happened in the text? Tell what a character said. Tell what a character did. Tell what a character thought, felt, or learned. Describe the setting. Describe an important event that occurred. Explain a problem that was encountered. Step 3: What did you think? This made me think... This made me realize... Based on this, I can infer... Based on this, I can predict... This reminded me of... I can relate to this because... I could visualize... I now understand... This three-step process encourages students to not only tell what happened in a text, but also reflect on what they thought or felt about what they read. Here is a sample response using these steps: I have included a FREE handout for you to share with your students to help guide them in writing thorough and meaningful reading responses. Click HERE download this FREEBIE. If you are looking for more resources for reading response, check out my Reading Response Journals for literature and non-fiction texts. These resources include anchor charts for different reading strategies and skills, as well as more specific sentence frames for the different skills. Click on the pics to learn more. Writing thoughtful reading responses is not always easy, but with a bit of guidance from using sentence frames and prompts, it will soon become second nature for students!!
Inspire your second writers with this list of journal ideas and 2nd grade writing prompts shared by one of our Journal Buddies readers!
Planning to tutor over the summer? Here are tips for quick and easy planning! Hi there! It's Sarah! I've been tutoring kiddos for the last year and have developed a routine that makes my planning easy and my session flow smoothly. All of the kiddos I tutor are grades K-2 and in need of a boost in their reading skills...fluency, comprehension, and phonics. Warm-up I like to start with some reading that is simple or familiar. I'll either have the kiddo re-read a text from the previous session or read fluency sentences. I have my kiddos keep a composition notebook with past passages to go back and re-read. I use lots of guided reader books to find the just right text for my kiddos to read. These are also great books to leave for kiddos to practice between sessions. Fluency sentence strips from The Moffatt Girls are a GREAT help to boost fluency and confidence! They are also super easy to leave for practice between sessions. Fluency Reading Practice My kiddos have all had good sight word recognition and really need fluency work. I switch between leveled readers and text passages. I usually have kiddos read the text themselves first. After reading, we go back through the text and find words that were tricky and read them. Next, I have the kiddo read through the text with me or by themselves if they are confident. Using a leveled reader Using fluency passages and recording words read per minute (the kiddos love to see their growth!) Find these fluency passages HERE! Using text evidence passages. Grab these passages HERE! Comprehension After some fluency practice with the selected text, I move into comprehension work. In our district, kiddos need to do a written response comprehension question as part of their reading assessment. I have my kiddos practice a written response question with every text and in every session. Comprehension with level reader I use these question stems to develop questions based on the text. Grab the question stems HERE! Completed written response, kiddos write in their composition journal Comprehension with text evidence passages. Grab these passages HERE! Here I use a reading passage with several comprehension tasks for a 2nd grade kiddo. Find these reading passage + comprehension packets HERE! Phonics After the reading and comprehension tasks are complete, I work on some phonics task with my kiddos. One of my favorite tasks is doing a word family word splash. I select a word from our text. I like how this tasks shows kiddos that if they can spell a work like bat, they can also spell cat, mat, sat, etc. Writing short sentences with words from the Word Family Splash Word building and sounding out Extras I like to use phonics poems as an additional fluency tool. The kiddos glue them into their composition notebook so they can go back and re-read between sessions, continuing to build fluency with familiar texts. These phonics poems are from Susan Jones. I use our Literacy Bags in between reading tasks. Literacy Bags break up the rigorous reading and fluency practice we do for much of the session. You can find Literacy Bags HERE! I'm working with a few Kindergartners who need sight word practice. I use the K version of our Differentiated Reading Fluency passages. In K, the passages start as reading letters, then sight words fluently. It perfect support for my K kiddos! You can grab these HERE! Additionally, our Print a Standard packs have been a great support for targeting specific skills students need to work on. Each pack contains tasks for one standard and has several activities for that standard, so there are a lot of opportunities to help the student learn, practice, and master standards based skills. You can grab Print a Standard packs for ELA AND MATH HERE! Connecting with students and parents on a more personal level is the best part of tutoring. I love giving kiddos instant feedback and celebrating their successes! I also love that I can give them more choices to foster a love of reading. In the picture above, I'm showing several text selections. The kiddos I'm working with is able to choose the book he'll read with me for the session. I also love being able to help parents foster learning at home. I've found most all of my parents did not really know about their kiddo's reading level or reading abilities. This makes it difficult for parents to find the best "just right" books for reading at home. After I work with a kiddo, I leave the text piece we worked on for that session (a passage or a book) so the kiddo can re-read it with parents. I leave their composition notebooks with phonics poems for the kiddos to go back a re-read. I also leave the fluency sentence strips for practice between sessions.
As teachers begin planning for back to school, I see an abundance of creative classrooms filling my Instagram and Pinterest feeds. I love seeing how other
You're in the middle of your writing block during the day and students are sitting at their desks (maybe on the floor or in bean bags dispersed throughout the room) writing. Smoke is coming out of their pencils. They are writing epic stories about dragons, or spaceships -- or something equally as epic. This is your classroom every day, right? (Not) "I don't know what to write about!" (now that's more like it!) At least that's what *I* used to hear a lot. Well, no more. Give even those most reluctant writers something to talk about with "Roll and Write." You can make anything work if you turn it into a game, right? Here's how it works. You give each student a copy of the page below to place in their writer's folders. When they are stuck on what to write about, they simply roll a die three times. The first roll indicates the setting of their story (so if I roll a 3, my setting is a party on Friday night). The second roll gives them a character, and the third roll gives them a plot. The stories can turn out pretty hilarious. It encourages creativity and originality. No three rolls are the same. This freebie even includes a blank 'Roll and Write' sheet for you to swap out new combos every so often. Even that student that hates writing can get on board with a story about a frazzled teacher at the beach last summer that breaks her ankle. Oh shoot - did I just jinx you? I wish you no harm, a teacher needs her summer! :) Grab your freebie here! I'd love to hear about the stories your students come up with! Pin this post for later:
Don't have time in your day to reach every student? My 10 Minute Reading Intervention resource can help you squeeze in lessons that are fast & effective!
Making connections is a strategy that readers use to better understand the text they are reading. It's one of the most powerful strategies your readers have in their tool belts. Readers use their prior knowledge to make a text to self, text to text, or text to world connection to what they are reading. I have put together some lessons and activities for the elementary classroom that can be helpful in teaching this valuable reading strategy. The first thing you want to do is make sure students have a basic understanding of the word connection. You can start with this simple opening activity. Put four of the provided cards into a bag. Pull them out and show them to students. Ask them what the connection is between the objects in the bag. Have a conversation about how they are connected. Then talk about any connections they have to those objects. It's a very basic way of discussing what connections are. You can then relate that to making connections in a book. I included five sets of cards that you could use each day of the week or you could split the students into groups and have them discuss connections with their groups. I would model describing the connection on the card above, because students will have to describe their connections in writing during the unit. You could laminate this to use again. The posters I included cover the three different types of connections that readers can make. For the anchor chart, I also included sentence frames for students to refer to throughout the unit when describing their connections. Text to Self Connection Craft I would explicitly teach one type of connection each day at first. You can uses these crafts for students to record their connections each day. Lots of modeling will probably be needed. Text to Text Connection Craft Text to World Connection Craft Once students have learned the different types of connections, you can go into making them understand that you can make different types of connections within one text. Give each student the 3 strips for the different types of connections they can make to a text. You can then make them into a chain connecting these cards to the name of the text you read. Close your lesson by summarizing the connections made on the cards above. This is a great visual for students to understand how making connections works. I always like for my students to have these little hats to wear while practicing the strategy. They also can get these bookmarks and badges. Always use some sort of exit ticket to close your lesson. This is where you will get an additional assessment to guide your instruction for the next day, as well as your small strategy groups. I like to always include additional graphic organizers for additional lessons on making connections, as well as for small groups and centers. I made them for the three different types of connections. You can use these case files for your whole group lessons or during small group teacher table. After you have taught how these work, these are great for a literacy center! Finally, a fun Friday activity we love to do are Brown Bag Book Clubs! You fill the bag with popcorn and have students fill out the graphic organizer over a read aloud. They then get into groups to discuss their connections with their book club, as well as to review other strategies previously learned. I hope these making connections activities are helpful for your readers! You can find it HERE or by clicking any of the images in this post. If you own the Reading Comprehension Bundle, it has been added there, too, so be sure to download it in your My Purchases tab. Happy reading!
So you’ve taught your students to write sentences. Now what? In the beginning of my career, we worked HARD on writing sentences. When it came time to take the next step into writing paragraphs, I found this was even harder for my students. We were able to write 2-3 sentences about a topic or picture, ... Read More about How to Scaffold Paragraph Writing for Special Education
Looking for ways to use comprehension passages in your classroom? Come check out how use mine plus check out my new comprehension one pagers!
Are you looking for some new ideas or ways to use informal assessments in your classroom? This is a complete A to Z list of assessment ideas for you!
Generally, when we think of book reports, we think of fiction reading response. However, nonfiction book report templates serve equally as important of a purpose for digging deep into nonfiction texts. Book reports are such
