and living life one day- and book- at a time
One of the projects that I like to do every other year is to have my students create Poetry Lapbooks. I generally will assign the lapbook at the beginning of the unit and will teach my content throughout. By the end of the unit the students will have their list of terms and examples from …
SSR or Silent Sustained Reading is something that you should include in your classroom daily as it: Improves reading stamina Provides students with enjoyment Improves test scores Increases confidence Improves reading stamina It’s true that students lack the stamina needed to read during the state testing. Too often, students become weary after reading long passages …
One of the hardest reading skills for students has been to identify and use text structures. Due to this, I decided to create a way of scaffolding instruction for text structures during this quarter. Generally I would teach text structure as I came across it in a text, but after reading their short stories from …
What if I told you that there was an easy way to increase reading scores in your students’ tests that didn’t involve more testing and more lessons? In the past, I was introduced to the concept of reading literacy. The district I worked with had a very strict policy of including Independent Reading, Read Alouds, …
These two education books have been life changing in my classroom this year. I was introduced to the books last year when my school district decided to start using Jennifer Serravallo’s Reading Assessment Kit for Fiction. The district placed heavy emphasis on teaching reading due to the fact that so many students were struggling with …
Finding books for boys that they find interesting and that will engage them in reading can be difficult. So many times, especially in middle school, boys tend to move away from books. Last year, I challenged my students to read. They kept a reading log, and we started off with 15 minutes each class period …
Last week my students started reading an excerpt from The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan titled “Two Kinds.” To help students understand the mother’s perspective (plus that of an upcoming short story), I wanted to do a Jigsaw Reading Activity that involved the students reading select articles on Chinese culture. The only problem with …