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Looking for esl task cards to use with your english language learners? Try these picture cards that are perfect for quick and effective language practice!

Teaching essay writing to students can be tricky, especially for reluctant learners. Read 10 Ways to Make Essay Writing Less Stressful and More Successful

Follow this step-by-step lesson plan to teach your students how

Hi Friends! Confession time…writing is my LEAST favorite subject to teach. I know, I know…teachers shouldn’t have favorites! In all seriousness, teaching writing to first graders was not my favorite subject to teach. I was in a place where I thought, “If it’s boring to me, isn’t it boring for them?” I desperately needed to spice things up. That year I made it my professional goal to improve my writing instruction. I spent time reading, researching best practices and developing a system that would work in my classroom. As a result the Daily Quick Writes were born. The idea behind the quick write is to focus more on the quality of writing, instead of the quantity. A quick write prompt should only take 5-10 minutes…we all have time for that! The prompts are versatile and cover a wide range of topics. They were designed to encourage your students to express themselves as they learn the art of writing! I typically used a writing prompt a day as a writing workshop warm-up, however it can be used any time that works for your classroom. The original Daily Quick Writes were designed for kindergarten and 1st grade students. When I moved to 3rdgrade I developed Daily Quick Writes for BIG KIDS. The prompts are similar, providing an amazing opportunity for differentiation! Over the past few years I have had many requested for a blank version of the Daily Quick Writes paper. I have good news friends, I FINALLY did and it is a FREE download! Daily Quick Writes Subscribe to get the your download & check your email! Subscribe Powered By ConvertKit Daily Quick Writes for BIG KIDS! Subscribe to get your download & check your email! Subscribe Powered By ConvertKit

This week I have been visiting third grade classrooms to do lessons on strategies for success on the SOLs. Third grade students will be taking the SOLs for the first time starting May 13th. Some of them shared that they are feeling scared, nervous, worried, excited, etc. The goal of this lesson is to build their confidence and give them strategies to help them do their best. The lesson is titled "You're In Control". We started by watching this video: Next, we moved on to identifying strategies that can help students be successful on the tests. There are many things students can do before, and the day of the test to help them do their best. We talked about being in control of our success. We used the buttons on a remote control as examples for things we can do to stay in control. As a class we came up with lots of ideas and then students picked their top 10 for their remote control. Here is an example of what your student might be bringing home: Here is a list of some strategies the classes came up with: Prepare and study-use your resources Take your time, you have as long as you need Relax and take deep breaths Flag questions you want to go back and review Reread Get enough sleep Eat a good breakfast Take breaks: water, walking, bathroom Circle key words Wear comfortable clothes and dress for success Cross out wrong answers Use your tools remove distractions BE CONFIDENT! You're going to rock this test!

Analyzing writing curriculums, planning writing workshop and teaching writing lessons can be overwhelming. You might think, how am I going to fit everything in and produce successful writers? Where do I start? What skills do they need? This post will share the 7 BASIC WRITING LESSONS that every teacher should teach! With this basic knowledge, students will be able to perform other writing assignments more effectively. The following skills are not only effective in upper elementary, they are often needed at the middle school level for review or the primary level for differentiation. So yes, every teacher should teach them! If you start with these 7 fundamental skills, it will set the expectations for your writing lessons and assignments throughout the year! Frequently Asked Questions What are the basic skills and what order should I teach them? Sentence Structure 1. Complete Sentences Lesson for complete sentences 2. Fragments Lesson for fragments 3. Run-ons Lesson for run-ons Paragraph Writing 4. Topic Sentences Lesson for topic sentences 5. Relevant Details Lesson for relevant details 6. Transition Words Lesson for transition words 7. Closing Sentences Lesson for closing sentences How much time should I dedicate to teaching these fundamental skills? I recommend one day for each skill. If you spend a whole writing block for each skill, students will benefit from the practice. How do I teach each skill? First: Start with an anchor chart explaining the skill. (See each lesson link above for effective anchor charts.) Second: Provide examples. Students can share examples too! Next: Students should take notes. I love using Interactive Writing Notebooks to take notes. Research supports the use of interactive notebooks through studies on multiple intelligences, the brain and note taking. Here are a few videos to Set Up Interactive Writing Notebooks. Click photo for the Upper Elementary Version. A Primary Version is also available. Then: Identify the skill. Provide practice sheets and task cards for students to practice identifying the skill in sentences and paragraphs. Last: Apply the skill. Students should have the opportunity to write their own sentence or paragraph to apply the particular skill. What if I can't fit the lesson in one writing block? If you can't extend the days to complete them, there are other ways to get the whole lesson in. You can put practice sheets or task cards in a center, or you can have students apply the skill for homework or morning work the next day. What if my students, some of my students, or absent students can't do interactive notebooks? Make a small anchor chart to put in their notebooks with the same information! If you don't have a printable poster, take a picture of the anchor chart you used in class and print them off! I hope you found this post helpful and your students become successful writers this year! Connect With Me! TPT Store Facebook Pinterest My Blog

Read about several important note taking strategies to share with middle and high school students as well as how to establish expectations.

I am so excited to launch my first "series" of blog posts! It's making me feel all grown-up and blogger-like :)My first series is going to be on increasing student engagement in the classroom. Over

Learn what the CER writing strategy is and how you can use it to strength analysis and writing skills in your grade 4 5 6 science classroom.

Wondering how to engage students in meaningful learning? This ultimate list of active learning strategies is a great reference to use while lesson planning.

Long vocabulary lists can appear daunting and unlearnable at first glance, but they don’t have to be perceived in such a way. Here we have engaging and entertaining activities, games, and strategies to help your students master their vocab lists with ease. Learning is made fun with the right

These five super simple and straightforward techniques are proven to improve writing skill and sophistication. They can be used in both essays and narrative writing.Using The Writing Revolution strategies, this slideshow is full examples to teach each strategy one at a time. These tried and true str...

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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.

Does your child struggle with Dysgraphia? There are many ways to help them improve their writing. Tools and strategies to help a child with dysgraphia at home.

I have so much to share with you about writing interventions, but first things first: WHAT DO YOU THINK OF THE NEW BLOG DESIGN?!?!? Please share your thoughts! Every year, I meet lots of middle schoolers who struggle with writing. And every year, I play around with lots of different interventions to meet their needs. Last year, I made establishing sound writing interventions one of my big goals. I spent lots of time (and money!!) on resources that I could use, and by about March, I had something that I thought I was pretty happy with. This year, I'm starting off with those interventions that worked so well last year and I couldn't be happier with the results! In fact, I'm so pleased with how they are working, I feel confident enough to share my practice with my blog readers. I can say that these are definitely KID TESTED, TEACHER APPROVED!! Creating a Time and Space for Intervention within your Classroom I teach by myself. There are no aides, special ed teachers, BSI teachers... just little, ol' me! So, when I want to create and manage small groups, I'm on my own. This is hard. It would be so much easier if there was another adult in the room to help, but there is not, so I just have to deal! It's work, but it absolutely can be done! A few weeks ago, I wrote about the Power of Bell-Ringers. Establishing a quiet and smooth transition into writing class is a great way to get started, but it also provides me with a window of time where I can pull a small group! By mid-October, my bell-ringer time gets extended to 15 minutes. The kids get started immediately and are clear on the expectations during this time. Now the environment for working with small groups is set: the room is quiet and engaged, allowing me to focus my time on the handful of kids in my group. I pull my kids to a table that I have set up in front of our classroom library. I have a "teacher station" at one end where I do my instruction. I usually stream some jazz or piano music during this time so my group doesn't distract the rest of the class. Establishing Interventions In my district, by middle school, there are no longer district-mandated interventions in place. There are no clear resources for teachers to use or personnel to help. So, when we have a struggling reader or writer in 7th or 8th grade, it's the job of the classroom teacher to meet their needs. In my tenure of working with middle schoolers, I've found that there are two types of students who need more support than my writing curriculum provides (and please remember... I am not a researcher/specialist/writer of books/etc. I'm just a teacher, like you, who loves my job, tries to do the best by my kids, and is compulsively reflective about what I see happening... to me, teachers are the best EXPERTS, but I know that we are hesitant these days to trust a "lowly" teacher and rather find ourselves relying on big publishers and educational researchers to show us best practices... I don't have lots of "data" to support what I'm sharing with you... just my actual observations I've made while working with real, live kids in an average classroom setting!!). Type One: Students Who Struggle with Structure The first type of students who need intervention are those who struggle with structure. These are the kids that can't organize their thoughts in a way a reader could follow. They simply write whatever their brain thinks at the time. They can generally stick with a broad topic, but because they are just writing whatever pops into their head at the time, there are lots of places where their writing veers off track and becomes confusing. Here is an example written by a former student struggling with structure: My dog Henry is my most special treasure. He is always there for me whenever I need him in sad times and happy. In many ways, he's my best friend. He has brown fur and a white chest. He is such a good dog to have around when you are sad because he always knows just how to cheer you up. His eyes are brown, like a Hersey bar. His favorite toy is a yellow tennis ball. Once he almost got hit by a car chasing the ball down the street. I have loved him ever since he was a puppy and we first got him. I was only 4-years old when that little ball of fluff was brought home by my parents to be best friends. His soft fur is always so smooth and warm when you pet him while watching TV on a cold night. He is my best friend and that is why he is my special treasure [sic]. This student is clear about his topic - his dog, Henry - but he cannot organize his thoughts. He is thinking about his dog and writes down everything he knows about his buddy exactly as it comes to his mind. Clearly, he has mechanical and conventional skills, and you can see evidence of where he is practicing what we learned in our mini-lessons and from studying our mentor pieces. But, because there is no organization, it is too difficult to follow and all of the skills he has are lost to the untrained, teacher-eye. Kids who write like this need an intervention that focuses on structure and organization. Typically, I LOATHE teaching step-by-step process writing, but in cases like this, I'm left with little choice. The lessons that I put together for kids in need of this intervention consist of learning how to write a well-organized paragraph. Together, we will work on writing topic sentences, creating strong and clear supporting sentences, and finish up with writing a closing that sticks with our reader. My favorite plans for this type of writing come from Michael Friermood. His Fact-Based Opinion Writing products are geared toward teaching elementary students (grades 3-5) how to write a good opinion paragraph, and they are PERFECT for my struggling 7th graders. They also lack a lot of the "cutesy" images that you find with products for this age group, so my big kids don't feel like I'm making them do "baby stuff." (I do not use the stationary he provides for the final writing piece... it's adorable, but it would be pushing in with my kids! So, we just do our paragraph writing in our intervention notebooks!) My plan is to pull the intervention group for one week (at 15 minutes a pop, this comes to 1 1/4 hours of learning). Long before I ever pull a group, I work hard to make sure that my lesson is broken down into five succinct 15-minute increments. Since time is so precious, you need to make sure not one minute is wasted! I can say that it takes me much longer to plan for a small-group lesson than a 50-minute whole-class lesson because efficiency is so crucial. The first few times you plan a small-group lesson, don't be surprised if your timing is mess. It definitely takes practice to be an effective small-group instructor! After their week is up, then I send them back to completing the bell-ringer at the start of class. I will watch them closely and conference with them lots to make sure that I am seeing a transfer of skills. If I don't, then it is likely that I will put them back in an intervention group in a few weeks to practice again. This intervention model will continue all year. Right now, I have 8 intervention students in one writing class, and 6 in another. By the end of the year, those number should reduce to 3-4 and 2-3. Never in all my years of working with small groups, have I had 100% of my intervention students "graduate" from small group. Don't be frustrated if this is the case! If you can improve 50-60% of those kids, then consider that a huge success!! Type Two: Students Who Struggle with Motivation The next group of kids that I work with are those who struggle with motivation. These are the students who complain a lot about not having anything to write about, spend more time doodling or coloring in their notebook than writing, and who will write the absolute bare minimum for any writing assignment. Many times, these kids produce too little for me to gauge whether or not they also need help with structure. But typically, once I can get them writing, they will likely find themselves in a small group for structure work :) Come October, after we've spent lots of lots of time list writing, the kids who are still struggling to get their pencils moving find themselves using a very special Interactive Writer's Notebook called "Musings from a Middle Schooler." This product contains loads of interactive writing pages that will motivate even the most reluctant writers. The pages can be printed out and glued into a marble notebook. (Most often, I'll have the kids create their own... I don't always have them use all the pages, rather I let them pick and choose the ones they like!). Cover Table of Contents page Table of Contents cont. and an "All About Me" page "My Life Story in Two Pages" My Favorite Thing Comics I created this project just last school year and it's been an absolute smash! The kids (especially my boys!) LOVE, LOVE, LOVE it! In absolutely no time, they are writing like crazy. And once I can get their pencils moving it doesn't take me long to get them producing some actual pieces. I don't necessarily pull these kids and work with them in a small group. The first few days, we will assemble our books all together at the back table, but then they go right back to the big group. Rather than do the bell-ringer with the rest of the class at the start of the period, they will work in their "Musings" notebooks. Fifteen minutes of that is usually enough to get them into writing mode for the rest of class. * * * * * * * * * * * * * * So, that's how I make writing intervention work in my classroom. Phew!! That was long, folks!! I apologize for my wordiness and I am grateful if you stuck it out until the end! Also, I'm sure that I've left out some crucial details of my practice, so please do not hesitate to ask me any questions you still have! Do you have any good intervention tips or strategies that work for you? I'd love to hear about them. Drop me a comment and share! Happy Teaching!!

Unlock Reading Magic: Dive into animated shorts and task cards for captivating main idea and details lessons! 📚🎬

A Question Matrix is a tool to assist students in developing the skill of asking rich, higher-order questions about objects, events, ideas, and places in their environment.

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hold students accountable while they independently read with these easy to implement reading tips and tricks and strategies

Repeated reading is a research-based instructional strategy with the goal of increasing decoding automaticity skills. The goal of repeated reading is not for students to become “fast readers”. Rather, we want students to read the words accurately, with intonation, and at a rate that is comparable to the speed of oral language. This resource was created to provide a rereading routine for students who would benefit from increasing accurate and automatic fluency skills. It is designed to be led by older students or volunteers, who assist younger students in the rereading routine. While it can be implemented as often as desired, we used this rereading routine three times a week for 6 weeks. Each student who participated in the fluency friends rereading routine was paired with a fifth-grade student who volunteered the first 10 minutes of their recess time. The older students used the assembled toolkits to walk their readers through the day’s rereading routine by following the instructions on the card. Each toolkit contained all of the materials needed for the lessons. This resource is designed to be used with passages or texts that you, the teacher, supply each week, based on the student’s decoding skills and needs. Please note, that no texts or passages are included with this resource. It can be used in conjunction with whatever word recognition curriculum, program, or texts you use. What does the rereading routine look like? (We chose the routine to take place every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. You can edit and choose the days of the week that work best for your classroom.) Monday: Modeling Day. Volunteers led the student through a series of modeling exercises. They first read the passage to the student, modeling fluent reading. Next, they did a choral reading with the student. Last, they scooped the sentences in the passage for the student, and practiced fluent phrasing with the student. If time allowed, the student reread the passage an additional time. Wednesday: Fluency Fun Day. During Day 2, peers and students used novelty reading tools to reread the passage in engaging ways! Flashlights, microphones, mini cards, and reading pointer wands are used throughout the lesson. This rereading day is designed to be motivating and encourage as much rereading practice of the week’s passage as possible. The card for Day 2 acts as a "choice menu" to practice rereading the passage or text several times. Friday: The final day of each week is called “Beat Your Time Day”. A highlighter or pencil, and a sand timer is used on day 3. The student reads the passage. At the end of one minute, the peer leader draws a line after the last word read. The routine above is repeated, and the student tries to read farther than he or she did the first time. If time allows, the reader tries to read even more than his or her second reading. When can this routine take place? Fluency Friends is a perfect routine to fit into a center time, intervention block, before school, during a designated "no new teaching time", or during small group time. It's also a great way for parents to help their children with rereading practice at home! What grade(s) is this resource designed for? You can use this resource and rereading routine for ANY student who is reading connected text! Kindergarteners who are reading short decodable passages, first and second grade students, and upper elementary students who could benefit from increased rereading practice will love this routine! Thank you so much for learning more about Fluency Friends! -Christina DeCarbo Miss DeCarbo, Inc. Copyright 2023 All Rights Reserved.

Don't have time in your day to reach every student? My 10 Minute Reading Intervention resource can help you squeeze in lessons that are fast & effective!

Teaching growth mindset can be done with read-alouds! Rosie's Glasses is a great book for this. Get ideas for using this book to teach being positive.

A blank novel outline template for use with Google Docs, Google Keep, and Scrivener. The One Page Novel is a simple, memorable structure for novelists.

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WHAT IS INCLUDED: PDF File - 100 Black Out Poetry Ready to Print Worksheets PowerPoint Presentation of Instructions included! These 100 Black Out Poetry Worksheets can be used as Tests, Quizzes, Homework, Class Reviews or Sub Work for your students! Texts were taken out of random excerpts of books from the public domain such as Alice in Wonderland. Each page includes several paragraphs that will include words for inspiration while engaging in black out poetry! This product includes PowerPoint instructions that guide your students through the necessary steps to be successful at black out poetry, and also gives them various examples for inspiration. Enjoy! I have done my best to eliminate words that are no longer appropriate in 2022. Please shoot me a question if you find anything I couldn't find! I will have it edited immediately :) *************************************************************************************** For Free, Current, and New Resources Be sure to: ♫Follow Music in YouTube♫ ♫Follow Music in Facebook♫ ♫Follow Music in Instagram♫ ♫Follow Music in Twitter♫ ♫Follow Music in Pinterest♫ Or: Follow ME on TPT! Check out my free educational website: www.musicinev.com Enjoy! -Music in Everything **************************************************************************************

Do you have a child who struggles with handwriting? Have you looked into Dysgraphia? Learn more about this condition and discover 10 Strategies to Improve Dysgraphia with your student.

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Download a Free Roll-a-Story Writing Printable

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:

Unlock the creativity of kids with creative writing! Learn benefits, get tips & strategies to teach in a fun & engaging plus FREE Printables!

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Find the best strategies for dysgraphia. With an abundance of resources available, we should be taking full advantage to help our kids.