Two of my favorite books to read in December are The Polar Express by Chris Van Allsburg and The Gingerbread Man by Jim Aylesworth. I love to use these books not only...
This school year, I did something different in my tenth grade classroom. Rather than repetitively stating classroom routines and procedures during the first two weeks, I...
Teachers are not alone in the time of the CCSS! The Common Core State Standards are a set of educational goals with a synergistic approach. Standards provide a common...
The organizer of the Boston Marathon designed the course with a starting line, middle course design, and finish line. The craft behind a story can be compared to designing a...
Professional development days are my favorite! How often do school leaders hear teachers in their schools say this? In this blog post, you will learn about the benefits,...
Spring is a wonderful time to teach students about plants and what they need to survive. Use the Growing Grassy Heads Activity to explore plants in your classroom. This fun...
In my post "Writing Communities in Schools: School-wide Literacy Action Plans," I wrote that shared value systems must be one of the first elements in place when constructing...
In this article, we'll explore the benefits of building a school-wide community of writers and literacy action plan. With the strategies outlined in this article, school...
Helping your students learn to write clear, concise sentences using fewer words is an important part of grammar instruction! Wordiness not only obscures ideas, but causes...
Practice is the key to mastering and improving grammar skills! Here are eleven elementary grammar worksheets teachers can use in the classroom to reinforce key concepts.
If you’re like me, I learned how to plan lessons using a day-to-day, period-by-period schedule. Lessons were chunked into 40-50-minute segments on Monday through Friday...