More and more teachers have been talking about how they are seeing student letter formation getting worse and worse. Is this due to missing in-school handwriting instruction? Or maybe it's due to the large amount of tech being used in daily life? Whatever the reason,...
This year is a challenging one in a different way than previous years. Students this year are coming into the classroom working below grade level and needing more remediation than ever. No need to panic! Let's do what we do best and meet our amazing little learners...
Phonics, phonics, phonics! It can't be stressed enough that a strong grasp of basic phonics is the building block that leads to higher literacy skills. Mastery takes practice, repeated exposure, and modeling. A great way to solidify learning is to use multisensory...
Normally, the groundwork for phonological and phonemic awareness is laid in Kindergarten and 1st grade. (Although, advanced skills still have a place in regular instruction in 2nd and 3rd grades!) As we all know, the interruptions in learning caused by COVID have...
Every teacher wants their students to grow as readers and writers. Imagine reading acquisition as a tower of blocks: each skill lays a foundation for the next. If there is a gap in the blocks, or one of the blocks is a little wobbly, the whole tower could fall!...
A teacher finishes teaching a math lesson she feels went well, but she wants to assess how well her students understand it. (Without giving a formal test!) This is the EXACT situation where math exit ticket boards come in handy! Read below for math exit ticket...
A field trip can be a wonderful capstone experience to a unit of study. The bus ride, the small groups, the feeling of adventure! But who says you actually have to leave the classroom to have an amazing field trip experience? The world is at your fingertips with these...
If your students are anything like mine, then Halloween is one of their favorite times of the year. Tying my instruction to Halloween instantly makes the content more engaging. That's why I love this digital Halloween math game. It gives your students the opportunity...
We know that our students are FULL of questions but focusing that energy on asking clarifying questions can be tricky. It can be even trickier to reach the comprehension level necessary to answer questions about a text. Successfully asking and answering questions is a...
“I’m writing student report card comments and I’m stuck! Help!” “I need to write 30 individual report card comments and I have no idea where to begin…” “What can I say on the report card so parents will understand their child’s skills?” “How do I write a report card...