and living life one day- and book- at a time
This week I started teaching my anti-bullying unit. It’s one that I developed after going to a professional development, and because it is mine- and a topic that is close to my heart- I love teaching this unit. I wanted to find a way to incorporate our informational text in with a novel study, and …
When it comes to writing, students can be intimidated by it. Especially narrative writing and writing short stories. They stare at a blank page and have no clue what to write about or even where to start if they have an idea. To help with this, I reached into my file cabinet and pulled out …
Each year with the use of computers in the classroom, the temptation for students to copy and paste straight from the internet becomes greater. Many students don’t know how I can so quickly identify what is their work and what belongs to someone else. Most of the time it is as easy as looking at …
I had a parent conference not too long ago, and I was asked about my teaching style. I’m adaptive. I know that at times I may have to revamp how I teach my material to my first period class as opposed to my third period honors. I know that even in my first period class, …
One of my main goals this school year has been to challenge my students to use transition words when writing. Often, it’s difficult for students to use transition words in their writing with a purpose. I realized when I started to teach text structure in informative writing that my students didn’t understand what transition words …
We started our poetry unit this past week, and by Thursday I was feeling about as “Blah” about poetry as my students. I hadn’t yet broached my favorite poems as I was using one larger poem in each of my grade levels to teach some of the basic poetry terms, so my enthusiasm was really …
It never fails. We create a fabulous written assignment and provide the students with a clear, concise rubric, and when we receive the work, it is far from what we expected. In the last quarter, I gave my students a written assignment and provided them with a rubric. I told the students that the rubric …
Last year, at the beginning of the 2020-2021 school year, teachers were given a very daunting task: teach a lesson a day on 15 topics for which someone else has written the lessons and assessments. All of these had to be completed in the first three weeks of school along with the usual MAP testing. …
I had a conversation with a colleague about improving my students’ writing stamina while still making writing fun for them. I was discouraged by the fact that students didn’t often think that my prompts were as fun to complete. To make matters worse, I sat through a professional development meeting where the speaker pushed the …
At the beginning of each year, I teach my students the RACE writing strategy. I find that many times, as students reach middle school, they lack the ability to fully explain and cite evidence from the text. While the ability to cite evidence is a key standard, it is also an important skill when writing …