Try this free, fun, and interactive middle school ELA games in your classroom to teach grammar and literacy ELA skills!

Visual perception activities that you can do today in your classroom or home. A collection of fun and interactive activities for kids!

Vocabulary instruction is so critical in today’s classroom! A vast vocabulary will help students to become better readers and writers. Vocabulary is also essential to their performance on standardized tests. Helping kids to develop their vocabulary is time that is well spent in a busy classroom. I have developed a routine to teach new vocabulary

This is a fun game to play with a pair of dice. Read a story and help recall the various features of the story with this creative activity.

I mean...why WOULDN'T you use cootie catchers in your reading block? It makes perfect sense. Ok - remember last week how I was talking about doing a little spring cleaning with some of my TpT resources? Well, I did a little spring cleaning in my file folders on my computer as well. Yikes. Now THAT'S a bit of a rabbit hole. I got in a little deeper than I wanted to, but I figured I might as well finish the job. I got rid of a lot (a LOT) of cringe worthy products that just didn't make the cut anymore, and I got some major organizing done as well. BUT - you know what I found? THIS >>> It's a reading comprehension cootie catcher that I TOTALLY forgot I made! And since it resurfaced for me - I thought I'd resurface it for you! I'm sure I made it for you guys in the first place, but I can't for the life of me find it anywhere on the blog. There's actually 3 different versions. They have different comprehension questions that can be used with any fictional book. They work great as a quick partner review game. You can download them here! Find any long-lost things in your spring cleaning, lately? Pin and Share this freebie:

FREE Learn Commas with Text Messaging Printables

This blog post features five free idiom activities, like a free idioms PowerPoint, game, task cards, and an engaging anchor chart!

Five Fun Activities for Teaching Prepositions. Teaching prepositions through playing games & enjoyable activities for children to learn while having fun.

Jumpstart your literary analysis instruction with these engaging and effective activities and mini lessons for middle and high school ELA!

Try this synonyms worksheet with your third grader. This synonyms worksheet gets your child to find words with the same meanings. Download to complete online or as a printable!

Kids will have fun looking for nouns all around them in this Grammar Activity for Kids. Simply print the Noun Hunt printable and head out for fun learning.

This post will include several activities and ideas including free printables you might wish to try for teaching prefixes.

GRAMMAR UNIT 7: CONTRACTIONS It is time to teach contractions ! My students have come so far with their grammar skills in units 1-6. Our language has improved so much as we have been learning about nouns , adjectives , verbs , adverbs , capitalization , and punctuation .

Free 7th & 8th grade worksheets, printable games, and activities to make learning math, literacy, history, and science engaging and FUN!

Help your learners use and remember subject-verb agreement rules with this set of two free games! Great for kids in grades 2-5.

Back when I was a student, there is only one vocabulary activity I can ever remember doing in class or for homework. It was looking up the word in the dictionary, writing the definition, and using the word in a sentence. I can recall this assignment itself (probably because of the sheer number of times I had to do it), but ask me how many of those actual words I am able to remember. Couldn’t tell you a single one, to be honest!

Try this free, fun, and interactive middle school ELA games in your classroom to teach grammar and literacy ELA skills!

Do you struggle with finding interesting ways to teach ESL listening skills? Maybe you have an activity or two already but you want to be able to mix it up and keep things interesting. By the end of…

These FREE Alphabet Hole Punching strips are SO CLEVER! Kids can trace the word, color the picture,, and use a hole punch to mark the appropriate letters.

Summer calls for lots of water activities, cool treats, and easy low prep activities like these summer dot activity printables. This post contains affiliate links. See my Disclosure Policy for details. GETTING STARTED With minimal prep

Some kids are naturals when it comes to learning and school work, other are not. But all students enjoy bright colors and friendly-looking graphics! If you're looking for a little something extra to make learning fun, check out these free File Folder Games and Activities! There are so many to choose from for all elementary grade levels!

This post explains how teachers can use an academic version of the highly engaging Spoons game to review concepts. Free games included!

Adding some fun games for reading in the classroom schedule will instantly get your kids excited to read! These 5 fun reading games are...

This cute color matching printable activity is great for toddlers and preschoolers. Free printable comes with 10 colors for kids to learn.

This is a great ice breaker or warm up exercise before your lesson. Students have to write 3 words that coincide with each category. This activity is especially beneficial for ESL learners. Once purchased and downloaded, you can change the categories to fit your lesson.

For the second week in a row I'm linking up with Doodle Bugs Teaching to share some of the fun things my kiddos and I have done this week. I hope you can use some of these activities in your own classroom. This week we continued learning about measurement. Last week I posted fun activities to go with the book The King's Foot. If you need some good stuff to use for teaching feet, CLICK HERE to be taken to that post. This week we read Inch by Inch (by Leo Lionni). If you don't have a copy of the book, CLICK HERE to view a video of the book being read. And if you have access to Bookflix, go there to see a super cute animated version of the book. The book is about an inchworm that measures different animals. At the end a nightingale wants the inchworm to measure his song and tells the inchworm that if he doesn't, then he'll eat him. The clever little inchworm says 'ok' and ends ends up measuring the nightingale's song by inching out of view. If you're studying animal life cycles, you can pull up images of the inchworm life cycle and share those with your class. The inchworm transforms into a moth, so if you're students are familiar with the life cycle of a butterfly, you can have a great discussion comparing the two life cycles. After reading the book I passed out an "inchworm" to each student -- it was a small piece of brown paper (which if you do this, make it green because the inchworm in the story is emerald green) that was one inch long. They used these "inchworms" to make an inchworm ruler that was 12 inches long (just like a real ruler): Students then made a list of objects they could measure with their inchworm ruler. Once the lists were written, we started measuring and recording the actual lengths. Some inchworm rulers were great and some were not (this was difficult for the students with fine motor issues) so the not great inchoworm rulers were substituted for real ones. After the measurements were taken, we used the data to create line plots. I forgot to take a picture of the INCH line plot, but we did the exact same as this picture -- just substitute the unit of measurement from cm. to inch. Now that we had the inch mastered, it was time to take a look at the CENTIMETER. We looked at a real ruler to see how long (or short) a centimeter actually is. Then we discussed different animals that are about a centimeter long. Most students said an ant so I passed out centimeter ants (once again, change the color of your ants; mine are green -- what was I thinking?) and we glued the ants to our inchworm ruler. Now we had a paper ruler with inches AND centimeters. Plus, my kiddos now knew the difference between inches and centimeters. We repeated the process and remeasured the objects we already measured in inches. We also had a great discussion about why ALL the centimeter measurements were larger numbers than the inch measurements. And of course, we made another line plot to show this new data (see line plot picture above - lol) Here's the BEST part of the activity (don't get me wrong, we had a blast with the other parts; but even my kiddos agree that this was the most fun) -- we created our own Centimeter by Centimeter book. It's a spin off of Lionni's Inch by Inch, but focuses on a 'centimeter ant' rather than an inchworm. (I actually did this with two classes AT THE SAME TIME -- a bit crazy but worth it because the kiddos had fun and worked on a variety of ELA & Math standards.) I typed up the beginning and the end of the story. CLICK HERE to download these pages (we used the centimeter ant but I left the downloadable document in Word format so you can change some of the information if you wanted. The parts you might be interested in changing is in red text). For the middle of the story, each student selected an animal that the centimeter ant measured. They wrote about it (with a refresher course on using apostrophes to form possessives) and drew an illustration to match. They were SO EXCITED about their finished products (ok, to be honest, I was just as excited -- if not more) that we brought them to the school library and the books Centimeter by Centimeter are now on display for everyone to read. That's all I've got for today -- have a great weekend. Am I the only teacher in the world that doesn't have a countdown going?? I think so...

I don’t know about you, but the high school students at my school are dealing with some major gaps. One of the biggest gaps we have identified is vocabulary. We also know that vocabulary is o…

Identifying rhyming words is an important component of phonological awareness. It helps young children hear, identify, and manipulate sounds in words. Developing a student’s phonological awareness is important to developing a good reader. A simple way to explain rhyming words to students is they are words that have the same sound at the end. Young […]

I thought it would be fun to teach my kids about emotions by using these simple and easy Inside Out emotions game, and also making emotion cookies!

Vocabulary instruction is so critical in today’s classroom! A vast vocabulary will help students to become better readers and writers. Vocabulary is also essential to their performance on standardized tests. Helping kids to develop their vocabulary is time that is well spent in a busy classroom. I have developed a routine to teach new vocabulary

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.

This blog post includes ideas, activities, and free printables for using dice in the classroom. There’s a whole WORLD of possibilities for using dice with literacy!

Looking for games to play with a classroom? This list of English games in the classroom is exactly what you need to engage students!

This is a wonderful free game for teaching nouns in first grade! Kids look at each common name and tell if it's a person, place, object, or animal. #grammar #nouns #firstgrade

This month, the Mob is focusing on vocabulary. There's no doubt that introducing, teaching, and reinforcing vocabulary is vital, but what is the best way to do it? Umm, Don't Try This Yes, you guessed it. Giving students word lists, vocabulary word finds, and even crossword puzzles are not going to build their vocabulary. Rote memorization doesn't work -- not in any real, meaningful way. But What Works? I'm not sure there is one perfect way to teach vocabulary. (That's the good news!) Since students all learn in different ways and at different rates, it's important to practice vocabulary in a variety of ways. We know that repeated, meaningful interaction with words helps students learn, understand, and use them. Try This: Generate Word Interest Help raise your students' awareness of the importance of word use by getting them out of their seats to play games! Gather up your Scrabble board and borrow several others and play scrabble. Even though your students aren't technically studying content vocabulary, they are searching their minds for words that contain high value letters and words that will fit on the board. Make a word wall -- or at least an "Interesting Words" wall. Encourage students to add words to a blank piece of butcher paper on your classroom wall. What words do they notice from their reading? Allowing students to illustrate the word's meaning or initial their word finds can help generate interest and enthusiasm for word collections. Subscribe and use Merriam Webster's "Word of the Day." While I wouldn't recommend trying to keep up with a new word a day, you could choose a word of the week. I love this resource because it provides an audio pronunciation and a bit of etymology for the word. Try This: Vocabulary Collector When your students are reading, provide them with a vocabulary collector. It can be as simple as a sheet of paper folded into thirds. Ask students to jot down words and phrases that they come along in their reading. These words could go on your "Interesting Words" wall or into a Vocabulary Catcher (see below). Again, you are encouraging your students to become more aware of words and how they are used. Vocabulary collectors are also helpful in practicing using context clues. Try This: "Vocabulary Catcher" Games Remember fortune tellers? Cootie catchers? Use them for vocabulary. The great thing is that students can create several throughout the school year and use them for impromptu games. I also like them because each one only has eight spots for words -- a manageable amount of words to gather and understand. I have a Vocabulary Catcher freebie on my Teachers Pay Teachers store. Be sure to check it out! The Bottom Line Vocabulary, whether it's content vocabulary or not, is important. Getting students interested and engaged with new words is the first step! So, what innovative ideas do you use to teach vocabulary? Share your ideas below! Happiness always♥

If Montezuma had an Instagram account, what would he say when Cortez arrived in 1519? My fourth graders have some ideas. We are finishing our study of the conquests of the Inca and Aztec empires and have been reading about … Continue reading →

Teach students and kids about careers with these 19 free worksheets and lesson plans. Career exploration for students to do.