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...
Differentiation and scaffolding can help students better understand and learn. Here are teaching ideas and tips to use in class.
You can reuse these recycling anchor charts year after year!
Teach about the rock cycle in a creative way with this printable geology rock cycle board game~ The Rock Collectors. Geology will never be boring again!
Virtual dissections can be a huge help in teaching science, biology, physiology and anatomy. Here are some of the best resources for your lessons and labs.
Students can travel across the globe without leaving the classroom. Check out these fun geography lessons for any grade and curriculum.
A list of little to no-prep, hands-on activities allowing students to experiment and learn Earth Science without relying on a textbook.
This post explains how teachers can use an academic version of the highly engaging Spoons game to review concepts. Free games included!
Microscopes. My students used to love microscope lab days. Who doesn't like seeing cool stuff like human skin cells, dog hair and pond scum magnified before their eyes? Before I let them loose with the expensive instruments, however, I make them learn the parts and what they do. That's where this came in handy... I love color-coded mapping activities. I think the process of identifying the part and coloring it can help our more visual and kinesthetic learners retain the information. I also have another version. This allows students to label and color the microscope themselves. It also allows for differences in vocabulary. For example, you may use the term objective lens instead of objective in your classroom. I always have them circle the label with the color of the part. Sometimes I have them list the function alongside the label. If this activity would be a help in your classroom, you can find it here. I also have other mapping activities available here.
Virtual dissections can be a huge help in teaching science, biology, physiology and anatomy. Here are some of the best resources for your lessons and labs.
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…
What are your top 5 best hits? Here's a fun way for any music lover to analyze their favorite songs.
Find the latest teaching resources and ideas for the elementary and middle school classroom. Interactive notebooks, classroom management, and more
Looking for games to play with a classroom? This list of English games in the classroom is exactly what you need to engage students!
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, […]
Full year lesson plans provide huge time savings to busy teachers. It is important to have lesson structures and assignments in your classroom that can be used all year.
Dig deep to really get to know the characters.
Beat the overwhelm of teaching an absolute beginner with this downloadable checklist
Persuade, Inform, and Entertain
10 significant reasons to read aloud to students on a
Let's dive into some new options to teach vocabulary, for those who have the time and energy to pursue them. In this post and podcast, I'm sharing ten ideas for making the study of vocabulary something students might even look forward to.
The Unfair Game is a totally unfair twist on Jeopardy that your students will LOVE to hate! Learn how to play and find sample game boards in this post.
People who recognize their own strengths tend to be happier and have greater self-esteem. However, when a person uses their strengths every day, they can...
Students love this silly, funny area of a triangle foldable activity for student interactive notebooks because this is a lesson they're sure to remember!
Whenever I teach freshmen or sophomores, I always begin the school year with a short story unit. I use this unit to introduce literary elements to my
Expect Unexpected Engagement When You Try Hexagonal Thinking in ELA Start with the Free Kit WHAT ARE YOU LOOKING FOR? SEARCH FOR THE STRATEGY OF YOUR DREAMS, OR DIVE INTO ONE OF THESEPOPULAR CREATIVE RABBIT HOLES. FRESH FROM THE BLOG Find
Use these Six Minutes podcast lessons and follow up activities to plan engaging and fun lesson plans for your middle school ELA students.
My favorite teaching units are my research and rhetorical analysis unit. I love teaching rhetorical analysis and assigning students a rhetorical analysis PAPA square. Read on to learn more about the rhetorical analysis PAPA square activity and to sign up to receive your own free copy! I love providing my students with the knowledge and resources they need to critically read and analyze text, know why it is powerful, and understand how the author crafted it. I feel that truly understanding the language and the text, primarily through rhetorical analysis, is something that makes all of my students critical thinkers.
Keep all of your lesson plans for the whole school year in one streamlined easy-to-access place with a Google Sheets Lesson Plan Template!
This FREE parallel lines cut by a transversal coloring activity doubles as a colorful reference poster or student notebook reference. Now includes a link to an interactive GOOGLE Slides version for online learning and teaching.
One fun math idea to incorporate as a weekly routine is a Challenge of the Week problem. It is optional for students to give it a try, but I've found that just by adding the word challenge and hyping it up a little bit...kids love to give it a shot! The problem is always an extension of what we are studying that week in class. I put each new challenge up on Monday morning and students have until the end of the day on Thursday to turn in their solutions to the turn in basket pictured. We go over the challenge every Friday after our daily warm-up problem. Students who answered the problem get a small prize (mints in my classroom!) and the recognition of solving the Challenge of the Week! Enjoy! Both my 6th grade challenge problems and 8th grade challenge problems are FREE! Be sure to grab a copy and use them with your students! Here was one of our first Challenge of the Week problems this year during our fraction multiplication unit. Go Badgers...Wisconsin sports is a fairly common them in my classroom! After multiplying fractions, we moved on to multiplying and dividing mixed numbers. I love how this problem really makes them work backwards and think about the process of multiplying fractions and mixed numbers! As we moved into our rates and ratios unit, this problem was one of the more challenging this year. My students get to know my love of baseball pretty early on in the year! Another challenging rates and ratios problem. Especially letter c... Here was a great problem that I used during our percents, fractions, and decimals unit a few weeks ago. Another Problem of the Week from our percents, fractions, and decimals unit! This one was from later in the chapter when we learned how to find the percent of a number. For our shortened Thanksgiving week, I got creative and researched some crazy Thanksgiving statistics. Seems like a lot of turkey per person, but I guess the stats don't lie! Here is a challenge that relates to order of operations! I also had to show one of my students responses because of how complex it was. I love it when I see things like this in sixth grade! On the left is the problem of the week. On the right is one of my the student's response. I rewrote it so that I could go through it with all of my classes. They loved the challenge of having to use order of operations to solve such a complicated problem! After introducing algebraic expressions at the beginning of our algebra units, here was a challenge of the week that I had A LOT of students try! As we continued our units of algebra, here is a challenge of the week that I had students try BEFORE we learned about two-step equations. I liked the writing aspect of this problem, as well as how open-ended it is! Once we learned about two-step equations, I made our challenge of the week a little tougher...fractions AND decimals! More two-step equations! This challenge of the week was also a great review of dividing fractions and mixed numbers from the start of the year. This challenge of the week involved finding a two-step rule for the function table! This problem was as we were nearing the end of our algebra units. I like how it brought together everything that we had been learning about...equations, function tables, and graphs! On to solving inequalities! This problem was before we had learned about solving two-step inequalities. Two-step inequalities with fractions! This was a tricky one for the sixth graders! This challenge of the week was just prior to learning how to find the measure of a reflex angle. I had a lot of students who remembered to subtract from 360 degrees! This one was one of my favorites! Some students surprised me by finding angle C first. I hadn't even thought to solve it that way! This problem sparked a fun discussion of the names of different polygons...including a megagon (1,000,000-sided polygon). Translations, reflections, and rotations! Putting it all together! The rotation step was tricky for my students because most of the examples we did in class were rotated around the origin! Moving on to areas...this problem was just after learning about how to find the area of parallelograms and triangles! More work with areas! I really enjoyed creating these area challenge problems! Putting it all together with a composite area problem. This was challenging with the two semi-circles! Composite volumes...combining what we learned about finding the volume of rectangular prisms and pyramids! This might have been my favorite problem to create! Who doesn't want to solve a problem with a floating pyramid inside of a rectangular prism!
This blog post contains a FREE compare and contrast reading activity! Materials are included so you can replicate the compare and contrast anchor chart and lesson for your own upper elementary and middle school students.
POEMS? That 5-letter word will send shivers down the spines of middle school students. Add in the suggestion of "poetry analysis," and the moans and groans can be heard throughout the hallways! If all this sounds familiar, I have a few teacher tips to help you boost engagement with poems that middle schoolers actually enjoy!
I am officially on Spring break! Two whole weeks off to rest and get ready for the home stretch of this school year! :-) I am so excited to catch up... on chores, seeing friends I haven't seen since Christmas, blog stalking, and so much more! Here is one of my very favorite art/writing projects we do all year!!! They always turn out adorable and they never fail to get some laughs from the adults! I got the idea from Patty at Deep Space Sparkle. If you haven't checked out her blog, you SHOULD! It is full of amazing (and doable) art ideas for your classroom (even if you aren't very artistic like me!) She even has them organized by grade level! So...the kids first did their writing about what they would be in 20 years. Here's the template we used: You can get this {HERE}! Here's a completed one: "In 20 years I will be 28 years old. I will live in a college dorm. I will be a police officer and I will take bad guys to jail. I will still love my family and I will still love meat loaf. I still won't want to eat spinach. And most importantly, I will be happy." The writing always turns out absolutely adorable! Then they drew what they would be in 20 years. They used an example I purchased from Deep Space Sparkle (from the "Fun with Self Portraits" pack!) Then they colored it in with markers and outlined their self portraits with a black marker. We painted the backgrounds, and a parent volunteer mounted them on construction paper and attached their writing. We had: Police officers (love the handcuffs!) Race car drivers (love the 'stache! And the braces!!!) Marines (so grouchy!) Ballerinas (adorable!) Artists (too cute!) And football players (not just football players- quarterbacks!) among many other things! Like I said, these are always a hit, you can keep them up as long as you want (i.e. until the end of the year because you're too lazy to change your bulletin boards LIKE ME!) because they're not holiday-ish (??? not a word! I know) and the kids love creating them! Check back soon...I'm thinking give away in celebration of Spring break! :-)
Last week we started our study of verbs. I have used a few free verbs study packs I've found on TPT to introduce the concept. I love thi...
These dynamically created Pre-Algebra Worksheets allow you to produce algebraic expressions worksheets.
After part one of guided reading and small groups in middle school ELA, this post outlines what the other students are doing during this time
Build your own atomic models with a few simple supplies. YOu can even turn them into mobiles! This is a great way to teach chemistry in a hands-on way!
