Cultivate lifelong reading skills.

Minilessons are actually really easy to plan, and fun to teach. What? You don’t believe me? Let me show you, right now, how to do it.

Teach kids about ancient history and vikings with this viking longboat craft, book suggestions and project ideas.

Learn how to teach your students tone and mood in writing, and get access to exercises to help them practice – read on to find out more!)

Attracts wild birds to your backyard year-round Made from a mixture including rendered beef suet, peanuts, corn, suet, oats and soy oil Non-melting beef based suet is ideal for a year-round feeding Great for birdwatching from home Designed for use with suet cake feeders Made in the USA

Making anchor charts has always been hard work for me. In fact, I never liked making anchor charts for the classroom. I did it because it helps the kids, but I am not a fan of my handwriting, my drawing is even worse, and let's not even talk about the time it takes to make nice looking anchor charts. As teachers, we do not possess much of that thing called, "time." I mean really, I found myself shoving down carrots and ranch dressing (because I want to be healthy) then devouring allll the chocolate (because I really don't care about healthy anymore) while making anchor charts. 30 minutes later, lunch was done, anchor chart almost complete...and oops...I misspelled the title. I mean really? Rip it off the chart paper pad, throw it in the trash, and rush out the door. Unfortunately, I didn't wise up for a long time. 8 years of teaching...and a light bulb goes off. Pre-make the anchor charts. In the comfort of my own home...I make the anchor chart...on the computer. Then print, and glue! Done, done...and done. Now...I still eat all the chocolate, but now I get lunch and I am no longer in the need of anger management courses over misspelled words. I may sound like a crazy person to you...but I know you have been there too. Honesty is the best policy. :) Now, I KNOW I am not the first one that has ever pre-made anchor charts, or printed items off of the computer for an anchor chart. I am in NO way claiming to be the first to do this. But, I have been a TpT seller for a few years now and the idea just popped into my head..."if I make all of my centers, lessons plans, etc...why not anchor charts?" And there you have it. Below are a few of the anchor charts I have made and so far I love them and other teachers are loving them. I waited to do this post until I knew others found a need for these too! And yes! I was not alone! It was confirmed I was not crazy and other teachers, in fact, DO have anger problems when it comes to making hand-made anchor charts. Many people have asked what products are needed to make these. I purchased my chart paper and Astrobrights paper from Amazon. Those two things (well, with scissors and glue) are all you need! Each Anchor Chart also comes with a student journal chart as well! The students can glue these in their journals for an easy reference later! I have also completed my Writing and Grammar Anchor Chart Bundles. And newly added, I have completed Classroom Management Anchor Charts! These are also included in the big bundle...if you have purchased that, just redownload it from the My Purchases tab on TpT. I figured these would be very beneficial to make at the beginning of the year with our students then either hang them up all year as a reminder...or just pull them out to review from time to time. Just depends on the students. :) There are many more but I won't bore you with all of the pictures. I feel like Classroom Management must be explained from the beginning and reinforced often. I know these anchor charts will help keep that process streamlined in your classroom! Making these are fun and easy! Most importantly, it saves time and SANITY. Want these for your classroom? Click Here to grab them in my shop! (affiliate links are provided for your convenience)

Earlier this month, I shared a mnemonic I use with my 2nd and 3rd graders for teaching story elements. This mnemonic is part of a larger strategy called 'Picture It!,' developed by Victoria Naughton (2008). Each letter of S.T.O.R.Y. represents a story element, and students can use the graphic mnemonic for identifying and visualizing the common features of fiction texts. Learn more about this great strategy here! S.T.O.R.Y. Poem Many people make up a silly stories or poems to increase retention. I am one of those people. :) According to Brain Training 101's article How to Improve Your Memory, 'A mnemonic device, such

I LOVE making charts! Step into my classroom and you’ll probably say, “Wow, someone has too much time!” but to be honest, I don’t! I just love them so much and love the w…

Do you hate to teach poetry? Do you want your students to learn and enjoy poetry? Try these simple ways to learn how to teach poetry...

In this blog post, read about my best teaching strategies to teach writing narrative endings. Grab all the freebies to help you teach.

This post will explain how I implement reading workshop into my 3rd grade classroom.

Ok, just because I've been gone from 'blogging land' doesn't mean we haven't been working hard in 4B. I've definitely been documenting a lot of what we've been doing! To start, it was clear to me that our old way of peer conferencing just wasn't working. Kids seemed to be goofing around, not really helping each other, and it was a waste of everyone's time. It frustrated me when most of my one-on-one conference time was spent managing unruly PEER conferences. I knew something had to change. I decided to revamp our workshop so that our peer conferences would hold both the author and the peer more accountable AND work on our 6-traits language. I introduced our 'new' method for peer conferencing using this anchor chart to document our process. After students finish drafting, they are to grab a 6-traits peer conferencing sheet and assess themselves by circling all the descriptors for each trait that they feel match their own writing. Mind you, we did a lot of whole-class practice with scoring writing based on the 6-traits criteria so students would feel comfortable doing this process on their own (and being HONEST!). Through our mini-lessons we've learned that it's possible to have high scores in some traits but lower scores in others. That's how we grow! Here you see Devin circling where he thinks his writing falls on our 6-traits rubric. (Note: The link to the 6-traits peer conferencing sheet above will bring you to an even more updated version than the one shown in this blog posting! Just FYI!) Here's another student assessing her own writing after she's drafted. This student has finished assessing her writing using our rubric. She decides on a final number score and circles it to the left of the descriptors. Then it's time to meet with a peer. (We have a peer conference sign-up sheet in our room which helps students know which other students in the room are also ready to peer conference.) Here you see this author reading his story to his peer. After he's done reading, he will explain to his peer the scores he gave himself and why. It's important for the peer to listen carefully to the author because it will soon be her turn to assign a score to this author for each trait . On the lines on the rubric, she will write to explain the scores she gives him. The peer needs to follow the following sentence stems in his/her scoring response: * I give this a writer a ___ because... * This writer needs to work on ... This process requires peers to truly work together, hold each other accountable, and it gets the kids using our 6-traits language a lot more. The second sentence stem helps the writer establish a goal for what to work on when revising! To see more of this peer conferencing process, watch a clip of us practicing this stage! Our focus lately has been on the trait of organization. We've been looking thoroughly at different beginnings and endings of both student and published writing. Here is our anchor chart documenting what we noticed! In other Writer's Workshop news, these are a few additional anchor charts we have in our room to help keep our writing organized. This anchor chart reminds us of powerful words to use to spice up 'said'! In reading we have been working hard on purposeful talk.This is so very important to the social construction of knowledge in any classroom! It's essential to teach students purposeful talk behaviors before even considering literature discussion groups (LDGs). The majority of kids talk like...well, KIDS! So, if we expect kids to talk like mature young people about different texts they read, we need to explicitly teach them how! Talking about Text by Maria Nichols is a great place to start if you're interesting in learning more about purposeful talk behaviors. I taught each of the behaviors individually through two separate mini-lessons - one day to explain 'hearing all voices' in a concrete way (without text), and a second day to practice 'hearing all voices' using text. Then I taught 'saying something meaningful' in a concrete way without using text, and the next day we practiced 'saying something meaningful' using text , and so on. Eventually all of the purposeful talk behaviors kind of blended together and kids started to discover that we often need to use all of these things at the same time in order to truly talk purposefully about anything! We did a lot of practicing, and I've been taping students in this process. Here is a clip of students practicing their behaviors while they talk about their families. (We had read a few books about different kinds of families to foster a safe environment to celebrate the fact that we all have different kinds of families!) We also had students practice their purposeful talk behaviors while discussing their best or worst memory in school (which helped warm up their brains for a timed writing activity we did during writer's workshop). Here is a clip! As a class, we watched these video clips to analyze our body language and other purposeful talk behaviors. I think taping and analyzing is a very effective way for students to learn how they should look and sound in an LDG. 'Keeping the lines of thinking alive' is a tough concept for many youngsters. Sometimes what happens is that students take turns talking, but they don't really build on what the person before them said. In other words, they don't really DISCUSS, they just share and listen. We applauded the first group in this clip because they had good body language and were respectful as listeners, but we discovered their conversation needed to be more 'alive' by asking questions and making connections to each other's ideas and thoughts. Mrs. Pierce and I taped ourselves doing a weak LDG and a strong LDG. As we watched each example, we used dots and lines to 'map out' our conversations (see chart below). In the weak LDG, we discovered Mrs. Pierce and I shared a lot of individual thoughts. The thought started, and then it stopped. There was really no discussion about anything we said; and Mrs. Pierce wasn't even looking at me during part of our time together! How rude! ;) In the strong LDG example, we mapped out a lot of dots and lines that were connected because we took each other's ideas and built on them. We truly discussed the text to dig deeper. We introduced several conversational moves for students to use to help get their voice heard in a conversation. Students also have these conversational moves on a bookmark that they keep in their LDG books. After we learned the respectful ways to speak and act when discussing with others, it was time to teach our kids how to flag their thinking. This is a crucial step to holding a successful literature discussion group because it allows the kids to track their important thoughts while reading so they have ideas for discussion the next day. Here are the 'codes' we use to track our thinking on post-its. We encourage students to use one of our codes to categorize the kind of thought they have and then write a few words to trigger their thought. This helps them when they get into a discussion group; they'll actually have pinpointed ideas to discuss! Students kept a chart in their Thoughtful Logs with all of our codes on it for easy reference. Here's a clip of our students as they practice flagging their thinking for the first time. The next day, students put all their new learning to the test. We put them in small groups to discuss the text "Slower Than the Rest" which is a short realistic fiction story out of Cynthia Rylant's book Every Living Thing. On another day, we used a high-interest two-page non-fiction text about leeches to continue practicing flagging our thoughts. Here's a clip of our kids flagging their thinking just after we modeled it during our mini-lesson. Below are some pictures of the kids' flagged thoughts. In addition to purposeful talk, we've also been studying the historical fiction genre. We've read several mentor texts, including Dakota Dugout by Ann Turner and Dandelions by Eve Bunting. Our first round of literature discussion books are all within the historical fiction genre. Here are a few of our historical fiction LDGs hard at work: Dear Levi: Letters from the Overland Trail Scraps of Time: Abby Takes a Stand The River and the Trace (I think I put my finger over the microphone at minute 2:00!) Oftentimes, historical fiction books will have a flashback in them. One group's book, called A Scrap of Time: Abby Takes a Stand by Patricia McKissick, has a flashback that occurs towards the beginning of the story. I photocopied some of the pages to try to explain this technique during a whole class mini-lesson. In the first section of the book, three grandkids are spending time with their grandma in her attic. They find an old menu and ask their grandma why she saved it. Chapters 1 through 12 flash back to 1960, where 'grandma' is just 10-years-old, living in Nashville, Tennessee at the time of a lot of civil rights protests. The menu is from a restaurant where a lot of sit-ins took place. Through the flashback a reader learns all about life during the 1960s. In the final section of the book, a reader finds him/herself back in the present - in grandma's attic, where the three grandkids ask their grandma some questions about her life during the sixties. There was also another flashback in the story Dakota Dugout by Ann Turner. We also read The Wreck of the Zephyr by Chris VanAllsburg as an example of a flashback in a fantasy book! In other reading news, here is a picture of the anchor chart that stored all the non-fiction text features we've learned. In social studies, we've been studying the economy of the five U.S. regions. Students have been reading small sections of non-fiction leveled readers to summarize a product or industry that is important to each region's economy. Students are typing up their summaries and we're calling those summaries 'articles' as they each create a magazine of our economy. Through this project, students have learned to: * Summarize main ideas * Center and left-justify their cursor * Use the tab key to indent * Change font size, color, and style * Bold, underline, and italicize * Safe image searches * Copy and paste * Cite their picture resources Here is the inside of one student's magazine. Next week we will be using this site to create magazine covers! Lastly, we had a chance to meet with our second-grade buddies earlier this month. We split the buddies up into two groups and one group stayed with Mrs. Adams to play holiday bingo. The other group was with me in the computer lab. Buddies used this site to play a variety of math and English games. One of the most popular games to play was called 'Story Plant' where students could click on different leaves to create the beginning to a unique story. Depending on what leaves were clicked, you would get a different combination of characters, settings, problems, etc. The computer generates a beginning to a story that the kids can print off and finish during writer's workshop! Have a wonderful weekend!

Check out these fun teaching materials for teaching comma rules to upper elementary including an anchor chart, videos, and graphic organizer.

Find fantastic resources for teaching inferences (with free mini lesson). The resources are ideal for 4th graders but also features ideas for grades 1-3.

Problem: I would love to study poetry with my class but I'm not sure how to go about it. Solution: Read on! Here is a way to structure a week-long study of poetry: Preparation -

Teaching reading comprehension is such a challenge! Learn how I revamped my reading instruction (and my reading block) to inspire HUGE change in my readers!

This is The Curriculum Corner's original launching reading workshop unit of study.

@MaryEhrenworth Listen to conversation like its gold #TCRWP #bookclub

Reading Fluency. Your kids will love these task cards that allow them to read with their silly voices. The phrases on the cards come from Dr. Edward Fry's Instant Word List (high frequency words). According to Fry, the first 300 words in the list represent about 67% of all the words students encounter in their reading. There are 3 sets here: Set #1 - Fry's first 100 words Set #2 - Fry's second 100 words Set #3 - Fry's third 100 words There are 408 cards in all. (It includes a set of blanks for each level so that you can make your own sentences.) The cards are numbered and color-coded for differentiation. All you have to do is print and laminate. Thanks for looking!! **This set is newly updated with better graphics, more silly reading options, and borders and sentences that require less ink** Thanks for looking! Annie ***************************************************************************** Customer Tips: How to get TPT credit to use on future purchases: • Please go to your My Purchases page (you may need to login). Beside each purchase you'll see a Provide Feedback button. Simply click it and you will be taken to a page where you can give a quick rating and leave a short comment for the product. Each time you give feedback, TPT gives you feedback credits that you use to lower the cost of your future purchases. I value your feedback greatly as it helps me determine which products are most valuable for your classroom so I can create more for you. ☺ Be the first to know about my new discounts, freebies and product launches: • Look for the green star next to my store logo and click it to become a follower. Voila! You will now receive email updates about this store. ☺ *****************************************************************************

Okay, I have a new favorite reading lesson-- my asking questions lesson! When I got a chance to work with Scholastic last spring, they gave us a bag of swag that any teacher would love, and it includ

Cultivate lifelong reading skills.

Social Emotional Workshop offers practical tools for social emotional learning and counseling.

I’m back from my little hiatus, and we are LOVING our new home!!!! My life has been absolute CRAZY TOWN, and I really haven’t taken enough pictures lately. Honestly, snapping photos has been the absolute last thing on my mind. I did manage to capture a few snippets of our classroom activities though. We have …

Writing Worksheet – Your Life Themes (PDF) What are the themes that run through your life, like the leitmotivs in a symphony? Have you ever stopped to look for the pattern that repeats rhythmically in your experiences? What is it you’re always struggling with below the surface? What are the phrases that define all of your stories? Twine your…

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Hooray! I’m so excited to help host this section of our book study! Catherine from The Brown-Bag Teacher was such a wonderful coordinator of this study, and she knows me and my workshop addiction love, so this was a perfect week for me to host! Let me start off by telling you what Donalyn Miller suggests […]

I'm linking up with Jivey's Workshop Wednesday to talk about launching my writer's workshop this year with some good old-fashioned Grammar Rock! I used to love to sing along on Saturday mornings to all those great tunes, some of which I still remember by heart. So, as I was thinking about spending the first couple weeks this year reviewing the parts of speech, I thought why not throw in some Grammar Rock! I knew I didn't have a lot of time to devote to this, and I wanted to make it as fun as I could to spark their enthusiasm. After listening to Grammar Rock songs over and over and over (my son was wondering what the heck I was doing as I sang along to Interjections!) last weekend I came up with a plan. My idea was to spend one class period (or less) on each of the parts of speech featured by Schoolhouse Rock: nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, conjunctions, interjections, prepositions, and pronouns. I would introduce the lesson with the song and provide students with a note-taking sheet to fill in while we watched the video on YouTube. We generally had to listen to the song a couple times to get the notes, and then we went over them as a class to make sure everyone had the right answers. Then, of course, we had to watch it one more time just for fun and to sing along! So, I passed out the lyrics and we did our best! After that, we would create a class anchor chart as a reference tool for students. These are some of our finished charts. After we did the anchor charts, students would do some kind of activity to practice using the part of speech. To go along with "Unpack Your Adjectives", students drew a picture of somewhere they went over the summer and then filled their suitcase with adjectives to describe that place. In another activity, students cut out different verbs and then fit them into a graphic organizer. After completing the activity, students were given a worksheet to complete independently to show what they had learned. Each time I started workshop out with the Grammar Rock song I would have several students go, "Yessss!", so I knew they were enjoying it. My hope is that as we talk about our writing and practice our word work throughout the year, this grammar unit will pay off. If you would like to try this Grammar Rock unit, you can find it at my TPT store! Subscribe to the Forever in Fifth Grade Newsletter for the latest info on freebies, classroom tips, and special sales!

Teaching students to write dialogue can be tricky. Use this quotation marks anchor chart and worksheet freebie to introduce the concept to your students!

Wanting to revamp your independent reading program? Try using a classroom book club, which is a great way to enrich, engage, and differentiate in secondary.

Writing and reading anchor chart ideas for the classroom.

Here you'll find your practical worksheets for you to download

Call and response signals are an effective way to save class time by grabbing students' attention quickly and helping them transition to the next activity.

Anger management worksheets for counseling. These engaging anger activities guide elementary students to understand that anger is a universal emotion and that each person has different triggers. By exploring various scenarios and reflecting on their own experiences, students gain valuable self-aware...

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Anchor chart inspiration for elementary teachers. Use my Not-So-Pinteresty Anchor Charts for Reading, Math, Grammar, and Writing.