Fun and engaging force and motion experiments, project ideas, demonstrations, book lists and more! Great for the classroom and home!
Prefixes and suffixes in first grade? Kindergarten ? What?! I'm not sure who decided teaching them so early was the way to go but never fear...
Telling time past the hour can be challenging for primary kids but it doesn’t have to be a struggle for you or your students. Learn simple ways and effective strategies to make telling time easier for primary kids.
This introduction to poetry gives teachers ideas on teaching poetry minlessons that make a difference in how your students think about poems.
Have you ever found yourself thinking, “I just can’t wait to teach grammar?” I mean, we know that grammar is important and that we do need to teach it, but let’s be honest…It’s not usually one of the more exciting subjects to teach. That’s why I came up with some games, to make teaching parts […]
Sentence sticks work great to teach parts of speech: verbs, nouns, adjectives etc. Use it to make silly sentences or real sentences too!
Are you looking for some activities for teaching suffixes? Check out these free materials including activities for Google Slides, videos, anchor charts,
Teaching students about modal auxiliary verbs can be so tricky! Check out this blog post that contains an anchor chart and four free posters!
Today I wanted to stop by and share some strategies for teaching vowel teams and diphthongs in our classroom! It’s always challenging to teach spelling patterns that aren’t easily decodable! […]
Is your child ready to read 2-syllable words? Great! Here are teaching tips for the most common early reading problems and fun activity ideas to keep your child engaged!
Teaching the doubling spelling rule can be fun! It is one of the first rules we teach our young readers and writers.They will love practicing this activity.
Make worksheets using programs you probably already have! These 6 steps will get you started creating your own resources today!
Hi there! It’s Deb Hanson from Crafting Connections, and I've decided to share an adverbs anchor chart and free printable with you today. First, however, allow me to express my dismay. Did you know that adverbs are specifically mentioned in the 2nd grade Common Core State Standards, but are not named in 3rd, 4th, 5th, or 6th grade standards?!? This puzzles me. To fully understand the purpose of adverbs, students must first have a firm grasp on nouns, verbs, and adjectives. I must admit, I don't know many second graders who possess that strong necessary foundation! In fact, I have found that most upper elementary and middle school students are easily tripped up by adverbs. Just a few weeks ago, I overheard my daughters (a 5th grader and a 7th grader) moaning about adverbs. My fifth grader was really struggling to complete her language assignment (that focused on adverbs), and my seventh grader stated how "bad at adverbs" she was, too. After helping Brooke complete the homework exercises, it was apparent that she still had no real grasp of what an adverb was. She definitely needed a LOT more practice. Each day that week, I helped her with her homework, and I paid close attention to the concepts that were causing her the most difficulty. (I must admit that I used her as my own little case study!) These are the three adverb concepts that were most challenging for her: Yes, adverbs modify verbs. However, they can also modify adjectives and other adverbs, too. The -LY rule! Many adverbs end in -ly, but there are also many adverbs that do NOT end in -LY. Furthermore, there are words that end in -LY that are NOT adverbs. When adverbs modify verbs, they can answer the question where. However, words like "park", "hospital", and "school" are nouns, not adverbs. Adverbs that answer where tend to be more general in nature, like "here", "there", "high", "low", "outside", "inside", "backward", and "forward". I observed Brooke's understanding of adverbs increase with each passing day, and by the end of the week, she aced her adverbs assessment. Furthermore, I put my case study to good use, and I created a line of adverb resources for my TpT store that directly address the "problem areas" listed above. I also decided that this would be a good topic for a blog post to share with all of you, which leads us here today. :) I created this adverbs anchor chart. It directly addresses the first two challenging concepts listed above. I created a blank anchor chart for you to give to your students. I suggest creating an anchor chart similar to the one shown above prior to the beginning of class. After you discuss your anchor chart with your students, you can distribute the student printable (shown below). I recommend requiring students to write their own example sentence in each box. This will allow you to check their true understanding of each category of adverbs. After you have checked their anchor chart, you may wish to have your students glue it into an interactive notebook for future reference. Click HERE to download this FREE printable! Here is an example of a finished anchor chart. If you'd like to view some of the adverb resources that I created, just click on the image below. The resources pictured can be purchased as one bundle, or all of the images are available for individual purchase, as well. Finally, I ran across a fabulous read aloud book that focuses on differentiating between adjectives and adverbs. Hop over to my blog to view the book, and discover how I plan to use it when I teach about adverbs! Thanks for stopping by today! FREE Newsletter! Blog TpT Store Instagram Facebook Pinterest My YouTube Video
I was hoping I would get to use this interactive notebook page idea next year. I'm a little sad that I won't! I was secretly hoping to teach pre-cal next year...not sure why... I found this small unit circle from Jean Adams on TpT. It's a free download. I like that it's small enough to fit in the notebook and still has room to label all of the important information. I also drew a little coordinate grid to help students remember where the x and y values are positive and negative. Sometimes it's nice to have a quick reference.
Anchor chart inspiration for elementary teachers. Use my Not-So-Pinteresty Anchor Charts for Reading, Math, Grammar, and Writing.
Get ideas for teaching the six syllable types to your students, details about my Syllable Types Resource and a FREE syllable types activity to get you started!
Basic vocabulary, like knowing prepositions, is necessary for beginning readers. Teach prepositions with this simple game.
CVCe anchor chart inspiration is here! I've gathered up all of my favorite free anchor charts for teaching CVCe as silent e, magic e, bossy e, and more!
In this six part series on How to Teach Spelling, this third post discusses and provides teaching resources for teaching the eight conventional spelling rules.
Converting metric measurements has always made me to stop and think. A centimeter is 10 times larger than a millimeter, but to convert from centimeter to millimeter we divide by multiply by 10. This has always send my brain on a bit of a loop de loop. I wanted to make a set of posters that not only showed the conversions, but also showed a size comparison. This way, it may spark a conversation about conversions versus size. "A kilometer divided by 1000 is a meter, but we multiply kilometers by 1000 to convert to meters. 8km = 8000m." You can grab the set of posters free here in my Google Drive. A quick note about the arrows, because I've gotten some feedback... The top arrow compares size, the bottom is conversion. I'll use the below poster as an example: "Millimeter x 10 = centimeter, but to convert from mm to cm, we divide by 10." I also got a couple tips from teachers for teaching metric conversions: "Horse to Fly, Multiply Fly to Horse, Divide, of course!" - Ms. McElroy "If you increase the unit, you decrease the amount (and vice versa) - I usually tell the students that they need to run less often if they use a bigger bucket to move water from one place to another - bigger bucket = less trips/smaller bucket = more trips seems a lot more comprehensible." - Ms. Baier Metric activities: Metric Conversions Digital Math Escape Room Metric an Customary Conversions Math Pennant Activity
Free Consonant Digraphs Posters for immediate download and print. Laminate and hang these in your classroom or homeroom setting for great visuals.
Wondering how to teach contractions to your child? Teaching contractions might seem complicated, but these helpful tips can make this concept easy to teach!
The personal financial literacy math standards include challenging vocabulary and concepts. Use these 5 tools to make it easier and more fun for kids!
Teach your child to recognize and read consonant digraphs /th/, /sh/, and /ch/ with a digraph garden!
Past, present, and future.
Make teaching coins, coin value, and money easy with these kindergarten money activities from a real kindergarten classroom!
Sentence sticks work great to teach parts of speech: verbs, nouns, adjectives etc. Use it to make silly sentences or real sentences too!
Want to get started with hexagonal thinking? This free, editable digital toolkit makes it easy.
Teaching self-esteem habits to students can be tricky. And that's because it’s often best taught as the need arises to ensure a lasting impression upon the child. As school counselors, we want to give our students
What a chemistry activity for kids? Learn the Periodic Table of Elements with kids in a fun way by playing the Periodic Table Battleship game!
We all fall into one of nine learning styles. Which one is your strongest?
This fun game is perfect for practicing the parts of the body with your ESL students. Have them roll a die and color the body parts in the correct colors.
Adding creativity to the classroom can seem like a daunting task, but it's important for making learning fun, engaging, and memorable!
How to Avoid the Summer Slide! Summer is right around the corner! We all LOVE our summer vacation, but not the "Summer Slide!" The Summer Review Packets
Memory aids are often used to help students remember certain spelling rules. The FLoSS rule is one of the first spelling rules taught to our first and second grade students to help them understand when to double the final “f”, “l” and “s” consonants at the end of certain words. The word “floss” actually follows the FLoSS […]
This post shares tips and strategies for teaching different learning styles to meet the needs of all learners.
A teaching resource that includes dozens of free printables and helpful website links to use in the classroom for elementary and middle school students.
Click here for the new blog post!
Getting started with coding in the classroom doesn’t have to be scary or intimidating! You don’t have to have a background in computer science to teach it, and you don’t even need expensive robots or technology to get started! WHY Teach Coding?
This trick will leave you wondering, "What sorcery is this?"
I love to read in my class. It is just something that brings so much joy to so many, that I feel like it needs a place of honor in my room. And while we do read our fair share of nonfiction, where I find myself (and my students) drawn to is the fiction stories. They are just so full of awesomeness that I can't help myself. With those great reads comes great lessons. Books (in general) have a beginning, middle, and end. They start with introductions, take the reader through many different actions which lead to the climax, that point we have been waiting for, and then solve the problems with a nice, neat ending. (OK, OK...I know not every.single.book does that, but I am talking in general!) So this past week, I wanted to focus on that story structure we call PLOT and bring it to the attention of my students. One thing that I have been doing, and have written a bit about in the past few weeks, is take a large reading topic (character, setting, plot) and teach it to my students over the course of the week. I break the idea into smaller, 20 minute chunks, and teach from there. It is working so very well! This week's chunk lessons all dealt with the idea of plot and how everything we read follows the same basic "formula". We started with an anchor chart describing each part of the plot diagram. What is exposition? Why is rising action the longest part? What does climax do for the story? Falling action and resolution are different? Then, we discussed how There's A Boy in the Girls' Bathroom by Louis Sachar follows this plot structure. I asked them to think-pair-share with a partner to see if they could come up with examples that fall into each of the categories. Then, after a group debrief on their T-P-S, I sent them back to their seats, with a plot diagram I had made and asked them to write down their thoughts. You can grab this diagram here. Day Two and Three had us looking at a story (written by my husband!) and trying to dissect it for plot elements. We read the story aloud, and then color coded the story using our crayons to represent different elements of plot. Deciphering between the exposition and rising action, and then falling action and resolution proved to be quite challenging! Our discussion kept us moving along though and the students were able to do this quite well. On these days, I wanted them to create a little drawing/writing project that would keep them interested in the story and also serve to get their ideas from the oral discussion to a more written, concrete form. So I asked the students to take the color-coded writing and draw a picture for each of the five elements. What picture would represent the exposition? What about the climax? How would the resolution be drawn? For Day Three I asked them to do the same thing, but instead of drawing it, I wanted written EVIDENCE FROM THE TEXT (ahhh....getting some of that testing jargon in there!!) Everything seems to go back to that test, doesn't it? That then lead us into the writing portion of this for the week. I wanted the students to be able to write a clear, coherent paragraph on the subject of plot so for Day Four and Five, I had them choose a picture book that they were familiar with. I guided them towards books that I knew had a clear beginning, middle, and end (ie: Madeline by Ludwig Bemelmans or Stellaluna by Janel Cannon ) and gave them an organizer to fill in outlining the plot details of the story. Then, using a paragraph organizer, I asked them to construct a complete paragraph plot summary. This was to tell what happened in the story, from exposition to resolution, without giving everything way. It was to be barebones and focus on the main ideas in the text. Using the organizer really helped the kids to do this. They were forced to only pick a few of the details, and really helped them to be sure they had parts from each plot element. I wish I had a completed one, but I forgot to take pictures of it! So sorry about that!! So that is what we did for our study of Plot in 5 Days. If you would like to have the full lesson plans, standards addressed, organizers, and all, I have complied them for you in my TpT store. I really, really love how these lessons turned out and kept my kids focused. It was great hearing them talk about Plot even out of context of language arts (ie: in theatre or when discussing a movie they had seen.) I also love that I was able to do this, and produce some bulletin board worthy products, in 5 days! Win-win for all! What are some things you do to teach your students about plot?
What are your methods for teaching vocabulary? Drills? Flashcards? Yuck! Boring! While these can certainly be effective, they can be a quick way to lose your student’s attention if you spend too much…
