I've been teaching sociology for three years, now, and almost immediately, I stumbled upon Introsocsite. It's a fantastic resource for any sociology teacher.
I'm back! I totally apologize to all my readers for disappearing for the last couple of months. I took my first real grad class this fall and had no time to breathe. Something had to give and unfortunately it was my blog. But, the class is over and I am back! I have so much to tell you but instead of one long post, be looking for short posts over the next week or so to catch you up! The class I took was TONS of work but also very rewarding. In Massachusetts, if you have even one student in your class who is and English Language Learner, you need to take a class called Rethinking Equity and Teaching for English Language Learners (RETELL). It's basically an intro to ELL and walks you through tried and true activities that helps ELLs succeed in the classroom. Being my second year in district, I found the class to be EXTREMELY helpful and my biggest takeaway is direct vocabulary instruction. I have always felt that vocabulary is such an important part of teaching social studies and last year I just knew I wasn't cutting it. My students were just understanding vocabulary on the most superficial of levels and I knew it was because I was teaching a population I had never really experienced before. In the class they taught us a vocabulary activity called the Seven Steps to preteach vocabulary. Here is a fabulous example of Seven Steps from an elementary teacher: I knew this was exactly what I needed but I decided to tweak it for my class. Now, almost every day, my kiddos walk in and we preteach a word or term they are going to need in order to understand the upcoming content (Tier 2 and Tier 3 Words). We do it in the same order every day: Introduce word and have them pronounce it twice. Ask if they know anything about the word and identify and prefixes, suffixes, and/or base words. Have them write down a student friendly definition. Tell them how we are going to use it in content. I also like to tell them how it is used in other contexts (for the word "convention" this week, we talked about the Constitutional Convention but we also talked about ComicCon). I show the kids a YouTube video that better illustrates the word or a visual. Lastly, the students are given a sentence stem that they need to finish with the students in their table groups. We then share out as a class. This method has truly revolutionized my class! Not only are the kids truly understanding the vocabulary, it has allowed me to frontload my teaching. As an example, I taught the term Articles of Confederation three days before we really learned about the Articles of Confederation. The kids absolutely love it and have been acing their vocab quizzes like champs. They can use the words weeks later in a sentence and I really feel like it has helped me make bigger connections in my content. I showed two different videos with this term. The first clip, I explained to them, is how the British knew how to fight and the second video was how the Americans learned to fight from the native Americans. We were able to compare and contrast the two styles and this whole lesson took less than ten minutes of my class. If you're interested, I have started to gather together these vocab lessons and have made them available on Teachers Pay Teachers. https://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/Mesopotamia-and-First-Civilizations-Direct-Daily-Vocabulary-Instruction-1675580 https://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/American-Revolution-Direct-Daily-Vocabulary-Instruction-1672787 Head on over to TPT to check these out and look for more as I progress in the year!
October 12, 2013 Fourth and fifth grade students are reviewing "rhythm" (the short and long patterns of the beat) in music class...
What is explicit teaching and how to do you use this teaching method in the classroom so that it is an effective method? Check out this blog post where I walk you through everything you need to know to help you make explicit teaching successful in your classroom!
We all know and love Kahoot, right? If you do not know about Kahoot then we have a few blog posts with tips and ideas to get you up to sp...
Once in a while I do a blog post more aimed at a music teacher audience, and this is one of those posts. This is the hello song that I sing to start every music for kindergarten and first grade. …
If you ask me, it’s always a good time to celebrate The Bard, but on April 23rd, we recognize both his birth and the incredible contribution he made to the English language. Now I know that not everyone thinks we should still be studying his work in 21st century classrooms, but I’m not one of […]
Teaching Shakespeare's language, particularly thou & you, can help students understand characters' rank and relationship. Here are some tips! (blog post)
One question that often arises is how can I use this nice shiny iPad that you have given me to support teaching and learning? In a previous blog post I talked about assessment and the importance of deeper and higher thinking skills. I mentioned in that post that using Bloom’s Taxonomy is one way of getting … Continue reading The iPad Pedagogy Wheel →
When I was in high school, back when dinosaurs roamed the earth, my English teachers told me what to think about the texts we read. They would assign texts and corresponding questions. We would answers the questions, go over the answers and then memorize said answers when test time came. It was all about regurgitation, […]
Teaching upper elementary or middle school students about correlative conjunctions? You'll definitely want to check out this blog post that includes an anchor chart lesson!
This post is part of our Fair Is Not Always Equal…Now What? blog series. Stay tuned for many more posts! Happy Thursday, everyone! Today I’m bringing you a list of critical success factors for all co-teachers, excerpted and adapted from Julie Causton’s book, The Educator’s Handbook for Inclusive School Practices. If you’re currently […]
Filler Activities for ELA (blog post) What can you do with five extra minutes in secondary ELA? Here are a few ideas to engage students until the bell.
Teaching firsthand and secondhand accounts? Check out this blog post that contains a mentor text idea and an anchor chart!
Let me start by saying that relays are not an original idea..maybe you have been doing them for years…but they are new to me, (and i love them) so I figured I’d share in case anyone els…
Check out these activities for teaching interjections including mini posters, Youtube songs, games, suggested books to use, and more.
Read how I carried out an experiment on weathering and erosion with my upper elementary class. Students get to use background knowledge to make predictions!
Logical fallacies are best taught by the discovery method. Students look at examples and develop their own definitions of what they see.
What is dyslexia? Learn the signs, causes, and how you can help. Dyslexia is a learning disabiltiy that makes it difficult to read and spell.
This really is probably going to be the most disjointed blog post ever! There were a few different education and non-education topics swirling around in my head, and I'm just going to lump them all into one post. I haven't blogged in a bit for no good reason than it is summer, and I'm being a bit lazy. Every morning, this is the plan: But, then I get distracted. One of my biggest distractions this summer has been this little app: Yes, that devilish little Kindle app on my iPhone! It has been so nice to have time to read fluff. I am still in the middle of two different professional books, but I just lost interest for a bit. I might need to delete this app for a couple of weeks so I can get something done! Like blogging and working on my TpT stuff. Figuring out this whole Tpt thing was is one of my goals this summer. I have some things I want to get done, but the time-suck that is my Kindle app has been getting the best of me. It was so fun seeing all the pics of bloggers who attended the Tpt gathering (convention?) in Vegas last week. It looked like so much fun. I've been reading lots of blog posts on it, and I have yet to hear of anyone that didn't have a great time, meet some amazing bloggers, and learn lots of helpful tips. In fact, I posted this pic on my Instagram account during the festivities. More on Instagram later! My goal is that by next year my Tpt store will be up and running and I will attend the next gathering One thing I am getting done is summer school. I have the best group of kids this year! I truly love them to pieces. They are so sweet, just really nice children who are willing to learn. No attitudes! They really make heading to work on nice, sunny, beach days not so bad. And, there are only 7 of them which has let me get so much done. My summer friends will be entering 4th grade in September but have reading levels 1-2 years below that. One thing I learned right away is that they are unfamiliar with the most basic of affixes. I know they were taught them in 3rd grade, but the recall is not there at all. So, when deciding what to do with them for word study this summer, affixes it is! I wanted to get the most bang for my buck. They certainly need help with spelling patterns, but as soon-to-be-4th-graders I feel mastering some basic affixes will help them more with decoding the grade level words they will encounter. For visuals with my lessons, I've been using this beach themed packet of 31 different prefixes and suffixes by Rachael Parlett that I found on Teachers Pay Teachers. It is awesome. And, free! She actually has this same pack available in different themes (pirates, jungle, Hollywood, and more) along with other for sale resources that compliment them. We've been doing one a day. I write the affix down, and then I give the kids a basic word that has that affix. I then let them try to figure out what it means. Once they do, we write the definition on the chart we've glued in our notebook. We then work together to brainstorm a list of words. After that, they select a word and use it in a sentence that shows they know the meaning of the word. Finally, they sketch a quick picture showing their sentence. This form is another freebie I also found on Teachers Pay Teachers created by Gaily Girl. It's a pack of various materials, including this chart/organizer. I will say that I did tweak it a bit, but it is essentially the same. I just changed the font, made one line dotted, and changed the center box to put in the particular affixes we are using. The form is editable, so it was easy to do. I only have my friends for five short weeks this summer, so we are spending two weeks on prefixes, two on suffixes (there they are below, ready to go!) and on our last week we will be combining the two. The best part of it all is that I can really see this clicking for the kids. They are using the new words they learned in our conversation and have stopped me during our read aloud more than once to point out that I said a word that had a prefix we learned. Score!!! After summer school today, I went to my school to grab some materials from our supply room. If you are not a teacher and wonder what schools look like during the summer, here it is! I really feel for our custodians in the summer. Our school is not air conditioned, and it is hot as blazes in that building. They are busy clearing out the classrooms, stripping and freshly waxing floors, cleaning the rooms, making repairs, and actually working to retile some classrooms this year. It is hot and sweaty work! They have to empty every room, do all that work, and then put it all back again. But, it all very much appreciated when we come back to shiny, clean classrooms in September! So, frozen peas. Yup, that's me driving home from school last week with a bag of frozen peas on my knee. At dismissal last Thursday, I tripped on some uneven sidewalk and did a full-on face plant (really more of a knee injury) in front of all the summer school staff, students, and parents. It was so bad, I literally couldn't get up for a minute. I was going to post a picture of my knee today, but it is so ugly I didn't want to subject you to it! It is blue, green, purple, black, red, yellow, and every other color you can imagine. I honestly can't believe how bad the bruise is. It is still really sore, but I'm just glad I didn't break anything. And to prove how sweet my kids are this summer, I can't begin to tell you how upset they got when I fell. I was so busy reassuring them that I was fine that it wasn't until after they were all gone that I realized how bad it was. To keep on with this disjointed post. . . I might be mildly obsessed with getting some Jamberry nails. I'm seeing them all over the web. When I first heard of them, I thought I could just pick them up in the store. But, I think it is some kind of home party sales thing. I do see though that I can order some on their website. They aren't cheap, but I think it would be a fun treat. Have to look in to this some more! Do any of you do Jamberry nails? How do you like them? Where do you get them? My other mild obsession this summer has been banana frozen yogurt. I tell you this for no reason other than I feel more people need to know about banana frozen yogurt. (You know I'm an elementary school teacher because I can't even type the word banana without thinking of Minions and laughing!) I posted this picture of some on Instagram a few days ago. It was a bit disappointing due to the lack of toppings. Notice there aren't really any? I wanted some fresh fruit, and there was none! When is the last time you went to a fro yo shop that had no fresh fruit?!! Speaking of Instagram, I have just started using my blog Instagram. I find I am much more of an Instagram person than a Facebook person. I use FB in my personal life for friends and family, but I find it really difficult to switch back and forth between my blog FB page and my personal FB page. As a result, I sort of don't pay any attention to my blog FB page which isn't good. Some of you have been so nice to follow me on it which means you are probably on it more than I am! However, I find it much easier to blend my personal and blog Instagram in one. I think I'm more of a visual person and just find Instagram more appealing. I need to add an Instagram link to my buttons up top, but you can find me HERE. I've only posted a few pics, but I think IG is one social media I will keep up with. So, that's my disjointed post. Which seems about right for summer blogging! :-)
This blog post features five free idiom activities, like a free idioms PowerPoint, game, task cards, and an engaging anchor chart!
Continuing our epic journey towards Shakespeare's 400th death anniversary on Saturday, here is a handy-dandy board game that allows you to relive all the exciting ups and downs of this master playwright's eventful life!
I don’t know about you, but my FAVORITE subject to teach is social studies. Something about the Revolutionary War and Colonization makes this girl sing! One of the big topics we cover in 5th grade is the Columbian Exchange. Per usual, our textbooks provide us with literally one sentence on this massive event. So, over […]
One of the objectives we’re working on this week {and last week} is alliteration. There are SO many great books to read to introduce and cover this topic. Some of our favorites are… Shel Silverstein poems are great for alliteration, too! My kids loved Picture Puzzle Piece, Noise Day, and Spoiled Brat 🙂 the most!! …
Synonyms and Antonyms Anchor Chart! This blog post contains the material to create this anchor chart, plus a FREE interactive notebook entry for synonyms and antonyms!
Begin teaching theme with fables. Kids easily find story elements and consider how a character's actions affect the outcome.
January is rolling along and my kids (both my school and actual kids) are finally readjusted to our routine after winter break. While in real life, I find January-March the three most difficult months to
After seeing Grant Snider's cute and clever illustrations pop up on a number of blogs, I was led to his site where I ended up spending a good part of my
This introduction to poetry gives teachers ideas on teaching poetry minlessons that make a difference in how your students think about poems.
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What if your next unit were self-grading and had students clamoring to work ahead? Yep, you read that right. Your next unit, whether it's skills or facts, could be presented to students in a visible trail of learning that compels them to keep moving forward. In fact, in our classroom, we're doing a game board system for GRAMMAR, and students are doing above the minimum to compete, succeed, and be creative. I've been slowly improving this system for five years in my classroom, and it has manifested into a really cool grammar program for my seventh and eighth graders. Now, I'm finally ready to share it with you. What madness is this? As any quick Google or Edutopia search will tell you, game-based learning is hot right now. A lot of people are looking at different styles of gaming to think about how we can hack the brain's motivation, reward, and learning cycles to help our students make engaged progress. My take on gaming is a basic one, at least for now, but it works. The game board I created is basically the full cycle of learning in disguise: introduce new information, practice, formative assessment, respond to assessment, and repeat... until a final summative assessment happens at the end of the unit or academic term. ...But when presented in the game board, suddenly all this learning isn't just a pile of work anymore - it's a compelling trail that makes students say things like "Challenge accepted!" Example 1: Grammar When I teach The Grammar House Cup, students follow a learning sequence for each grammar topic, gathering "points" for their houses along the way. (Learn more in this blog post.) Example 2: Essay Writing What if you sequenced your "game board" to teach all the parts of an essay, alternating between instruction and writing? The game board could have built-in checkpoints so that you are giving rough draft feedback (OR actually grading the essay pieces) as you go! It also opens up self-paced learning and a writing workshop format. Get the EDITABLE templates! I hope you've been inspired to think of options for how you could reframe or reformat your teaching and learning sequence! Check out my game board download on Teachers Pay Teachers if you want to try a game board program out for yourself! What do you think of this game board madness? Tell me in the comments below!
A FEW WEEKS AGO I SHARED MY REFLECTIONS ON TEACHING 90% IN MY ELEMENTARY SPANISH CLASSES, and one of the things I mentioned was my desire to teach learning strategies to my students right from the beginning of the year which would help and support them. The key to these strategies, in my opinion, is that they constitute a collaboration between my students and me- we each have our responsibilities in order for the strategies to be truly effective. I created an infographic to highlight these two sides, with my students' responsibilities on the left, and mine on the right. I've expanded on the infographic below. *EYES AND EARS ON ME: We all have those little squirrels who play with their shoelaces, braid the girl's hair next to her, roll about on the carpet, etc. Keeping tabs on those kiddos and redirecting them when they aren't focused is crucial to ensuring kids don't miss what is going on- I frequently remind my students that seeing what I am showing and doing is as important as hearing what I am saying for them to understand what is going on. TIP: Do a visual scan to be sure students are paying attention before you start talking, especially when giving instructions or other important communications. This makes a huge difference! *UTILIZING OUR RESOURCES: I make sure there are tons of supports for my students to access at all times, whether that be our contextualized bulletin boards, word banks in their folders, songs that we sing to help us remember vocabulary, etc. It is my responsibility to remind them those supports are available, and explicitly teach how to use them. Little kiddos do not all intuitively utilize these types of supports so regularly reminding them they are available is a huge help! *MAKING THE EFFORT: We as teachers are very used to telling our students that putting forth their best effort is an integral part of their learning. I liken it to being a member on a sports team- you wouldn't just sit out on the sidelines and expect to get better at soccer, would you? Of course not! You need to be in the game to improve, and the same goes for school. For my part, I need to support and celebrate my students' efforts, making it part of "business as usual" in terms of how I interact with my students. At the beginning of the school year, I have the above conversation with my students, and then we come back to it regularly. Letting students know that you are part of a team with them, that you have responsibilities, too, builds community in your classes and tightens the bond you have with your students, and shows them it is a two way street- working together as a partnership makes for a great year of learning! SaveSave
Life is hard. Disappointments happen. Sometimes we lose when we deserve to win. Sometimes we win when we deserve to lose. As adults, we've had practice coping with letdowns. But for children, the pain is fresh and the wounds particularly deep. They're not prepared for unexpected blows, nor do they understand how a loss might benefit them long-term. One rejection can feel like the new norm, and with every subsequent defeat they may fear they'll never break the cycle. Once a…
Find resources for teaching story elements to kindergarten, first, second, and third grade students including books and hands-on activities.
You can’t get the most out of university without learning to think critically. It isn't easy, but with our handy guide, we’ll have you thinking up a storm in no time!
English Movie Lesson Theo and Celeste. "Would you still be my friend if there were things about me you didn’t know?” Celeste asks her friend Theo while they’re on a seesaw. The two of them start an innocent game and come up with increasingly surreal questions.
A blog about elementary music education.
Filler Activities for ELA (blog post) What can you do with five extra minutes in secondary ELA? Here are a few ideas to engage students until the bell.
So the other day, I was looking at bathing suits for my kids at Target online. I put a few in my virtual cart, but then decided on buying from Lands End instead. Well, since
Dystopian literature is a staple in most ELA classrooms. Here are some ideas for teaching it and making it more relevant: Watch National Geographic's documentary about North Korea on YouTube and ask students to find
Are you feeling stuck or discouraged while building up a business? If your business doesn't look the way you envisioned right now, keep pressing on. In this article, I share a great iceberg graphic that perfectly illustrates all the aspects of running a business that people don't see.
Looking for fun ways to teach phrasal verbs? Are you an English native speaker, but struggle to explain or teach phrasal verbs to your students? Read this post for 5 fun ways to approach this difficult grammar topic!...
