Teaching theme will be engaging for your students with videos! Find the 5 Best Videos for Teaching Theme in your ELA classroom.

Research tells us that better listeners are better readers. We've put together this list of 10 Great Podcasts for Kids to highlight some excellent

This list includes my favorite books for 5th graders. Perfect if you're looking for fifth grade read aloud or novel study resources.

10 Minute Poetry Mini Lessons Makes Poetry Easy for Students and the Teacher! Don't second guess teaching poetry anymore! These quick, easy to follow mini lessons will expose your students to a wide variety of poems, introduce and review literary elements, and encourage students to write their own poetry! And the lessons only take about 10 minutes a day. The 24 included poems will give you enough poems for 1 a day for a poetry month or unit focus, or there's plenty here to get you through your school year (some of the extra activities for the poems can extend to a 2 day lesson). It's perfect! Keep printing simple - each poem and student analysis/activity is on a single page. You only need one page a day for students. No need to fumble with multiple pages of copying. Teacher directions are on half page cards in a simple to follow format. Easy-peasy! Stop in at The Owl Spot to get your 10 Minute Poetry Mini Lessons and get started teaching poetry with confidence! Check out these other poetry resources, too! Poetry made easy! From The Owl Spot on Teachers Pay Teachers www.teacherspayteachers.com/store/the-owl-spot If you want great classroom and digital teaching ideas, make sure to sign up for my newsletters! Not only will you get valuable tips for teaching, there's always FREEBIES!

So often, students just tell about the large picture of an experience. They get so caught up in listing all of the “moments” of the experience that they forget to really hone in on each

Daily grammar practice is a tool that helps students practice and master grammar standards. Learn more about grammar spiral review in the classroom.

Steal these for your writing unit!

Fresh journal prompts are a great inspiration for students whether they've been writing for years or just starting out! Try these new prompts for 5th Grade!

Want an intentional way to increase your students' morphological skills AND vocabulary? Try a morphology word of the day routine!

Great Ideas And Tips For Teaching Poetry. Poetry reveals many aspects of life that they may not get to experience or witness first hand. Poetry may speak some ‘truth’ about how others live and that helps build empathy with our students. Read on for 6 ways you can set your students interest ablaze for poetry! Grades 4-12 | Middle School ELA | High School English

Are you teaching poetry? Find poetry blog posts, freebies, and poetry resources that will have your students fall in love with reading and writing poetry.

Cultivate lifelong reading skills.

I began elementary school in the era of phonics. Looking back, I can honestly say that it seemed to work okay. Matching pictures with their word families in plaid workbooks... I learned to read, but

To love to read. As teachers, it's one of our basic, core wishes for our students. Some students come to us with a hunger for reading. Give them a thick novel (or better yet, let them bring their own) and they'll happily sit and read for as long as we allow. All day even. We can pretty much guarantee these students fall asleep at night with a book tented across their chest, having squeezed out as much of it as their droopy little eyes could handle. Other students "like" to read. And others "don't mind" reading, if they don't have anything better to do. Others will read at school but rarely do it at home. And still others avoid it like the plague. I want to share five ideas to help get all these other students reading more at home. To be clear, I agree with J.K. Rowling when she said, "If you don't like to read, you haven't found the right book." Helping students find the "right book" is irreplaceable. So the ideas that follow are meant to support this quest, not replace it. Concrete, fun tools to motivate students. 1. Personal Book Bracket You may have seen the idea of a book tournament, often done in the spring running parallel to March Madness, where books are selected and placed into a bracket-style tournament. Students then read some or all of the books and vote for the winners of each match-up. Why not streamline it into a personal book bracket? Give each student their own mini-bracket, maybe an 8-book tournament or even just a 4-book tournament, and let them choose the books. They can read the books at home and the bracket acts as a bit of fun motivation to complete a book and move on to the next one until all books in the bracket are read and the student can decide on their "champ." Be sure to grab the book bracket template you see below! And if students work on another book bracket afterward, you can even have them combine the two brackets so the champs from each bracket "compete" against each other to be the grand champ. 2. The Tower of Books Challenge Tower of Books is an engaging independent reading challenge, great for replacing a stuck-in-a-rut reading log. (You know the one... that chart with good intentions of ensuring students are consistently reading but eventually becomes a roll-of-the-eyes chore void of any student motivation. Yeah, that one.) The Tower of Books Challenge is based on two core ideas: to widen students' reading choices and to provide a fresh and motivating way to keep track of what they read. Students are given a reading list with numerous genres and categories of books they must read to meet the challenge. For each book students read, they create a book cut-out from the printable files, fill in their book information, and begin forming their… Tower of Books! Towers can be built with 3D book look-a-likes, each one representing a book read from the category list, or they can be built with 2D book spines. You can read more about my Tower of Books Challenge HERE, or check it out in my TpT shop HERE. 3. Book Connection Chain For students who like puzzles and solving codes, a Book Connection Chain might be just the motivation tool for them. The basic idea is to make connections between the books students read. The puzzle-solving part comes into play by having students connect the books they read in different ways AND to connect them into a loop. Look at the picture below. This chain used six picture books, connected in lots of different ways, from characters to plot events to genres, and more. Some connections are rather obvious and some are deeper. The tricky part is connecting the chain back on itself, completing the loop. It often takes moving the books around into different orders to get the connections to work. If they're clever, students usually don't need to select books with a certain connection in mind prior to reading them. Rather, they can read what they want, and then work on the connection chain afterward. Be sure to grab that connection chain template from the picture! 4. Top 5 Bookshelf For students who love lists, or who love to rank things, ask them to keep a "top 5 bookshelf" at home. In a Top 5 bookshelf, students keep their current five favorite books in one place in their home. If they don't own the book (if it's a library book, for instance), they just record the book title on a note card as a placeholder. The key is the changing nature of a favorite five books. As students read more books, their favorites can change, and their Top 5 shelf would change as well. You could even request students to snap a pic of their Top 5 Bookshelf to share with the class! 5. "Real Life" Book Clubs Book clubs or literature groups might already be part of your reading block schedule, but if so, they are often pretty full of expectations and assignments. Absolutely nothing wrong with that. But what I'm suggesting here is a type of book club that's meant to encourage more at-home reading, and to do that, I've found it helpful to mirror "real-life" book clubs, in which a group of people read the same book and then get together to chat about it. That's it. No extra assignments or tests or projects. Allowing students to form a small group with a book everyone involved wants to read can go a long way to building in some natural peer accountability. I've found it's helpful to set up some simple norms to help the group run smoothly but without mucking it up with a bunch of strict rules. For example: Set one reading assignment at a time and agree on it together. Do the reading before the group meets. Bring your book to the book club meeting. Mark one part of the reading that would be interesting to chat about. In my experience, informal book clubs like these hit some peaks and valleys with any particular class, and students themselves learn a lot about what works and what doesn't just through trying them out. Giving students the tools they need (like copies of the books and 15 minutes of time on Friday to have a book club meeting) and then stepping back is often is enough for them to figure the details out on their own, and can be a perfect jumping off point for more organized, "official" book clubs you use to incorporate into your reading instruction. * * * Want some tips to give to parents about how to support their child's reading at home? I've got a post full of practical tips and a handy printable brochure you can check out right HERE.

So the other day, I was looking at bathing suits for my kids at Target online. I put a few in my virtual cart, but then decided on buying from Lands End instead. Well, since

Did you think teaching students to write would be a snap? I mean, you are a college-educated, certified individual. How hard could it possibly be? Well, it’s a challenge, especially when just starting out. In my classroom,

Hello darlings! Do you teach vocabulary to your students? I think this is one thing we are missing in the upper grades and we are doing a disservice to our students. As they move up levels in reading, the thing that I notice that holds my students back the most is the challenging vocabulary they ... Read More about Adding Vocabulary to your ELA Block

I have used the reading workshop model for about 8 years now. It has changed a lot over the years! One thing that has stayed the same is the ‘Respond to Text’ station. This is a time where students get to write about their reading. The station stays the same all year, but the activities in the station change. Below is a list of activities you can add to your ‘Respond to Text’ station at the beginning of the year. 1. Bookmark Book Report At the beginning of the year, some students struggle to finish chapter books. I find that this bookmark book report helps them stay engaged in their reading. The students keep track of the pages they read, and complete activities as they read their book. There is a fiction and nonfiction version available for download. 2. Text Structures Tri-fold Students can use this trifold to ‘hunt’ for different text structures. Just put a basket of nonfiction books at the station and you are set! It’s a great way to get them reading nonfiction books. 3. Choice Board Students get to choose what activities they’d like to complete. This is great because it can be used for the story of the week (if you follow a basal) or the chapter book they are currently reading. You can have the students glue this page inside their reading notebook, or have them staple their responses to this sheet and turn in. Download the Printables: Click here to download the bookmark book report. Click here to download the text structures trifold and choice board. Add editing tasks to your reading workshop block! Math Resources: 1st Grade Tri-Folds 2nd Grade Tri-Folds 3rd Grade Tri-Folds 4th Grade Tri-Folds 5th Grade Tri-Folds Thanks for reading! I hope you will find these printable helpful :) Visit my blog @ Learning With Mrs S. Visit my TPT Store Follow me on Pinterest! Follow me on Instagram! Follow me on Facebook :)

Help! My students don’t remember the parts of speech! Yep, we’ve all been there. You start a grammar lesson, only to realize that your students don’t remember the basics. It’s not that they don’t understand grammar and syntax; they just forgot the technical terms (nouns, verbs, adjective, adverbs, pronouns, prepositions, conjunctions, interjections) that they need […]

Here's a step-by-step guide for teaching students to identify text evidence and support answers to questions with evidence from passages.

April is National Poetry Month, and what better time is there to teach and explore poetry with your students?!?! I love to spend the month of April having students read, write, and share poetry in our classroom. At the beginning of my poetry units each year, I find that my students are often intimidated by poetry, especially when it comes to writing it. Over the years I have tried to find the perfect activities to ease them into writing their own poems. One of my favorite activities is taking my students on a Haiku Hike!! Several years ago I found this book, Haiku Hike from Scholastic. The story and poems in this book were written by a class of 4th grade students. The idea behind the book is that the students in this class went on a nature walk, and instead of taking pictures of the different things they saw, they used the form of haiku to capture different moments and scenes in nature. I loved this idea so much that I decided to implement it in my own classroom. Here’s how it works... What is Haiku? Before you take students on a Haiku Hike, you will need to make sure that they are familiar with this poetic form. Haiku is a traditional form of Japanese poetry that is often used to describe nature or the seasons. Haiku is a three line poem that follows a specific pattern based on syllables: Line #1: 5 syllables Line #2: 7 syllables Line #3: 5 syllables I would suggest creating an anchor chart to discuss and display the elements of Haiku. Take a Hike! Once your students are familiar with Haiku, they are ready for their Haiku Hike. You could schedule a hike or nature walk as a mini field trip, but I simply take my students on a walk around the grounds of our school. Students take “field notes” throughout the hike. I ask them to take notes about what they see, hear, and feel, and encourage them to be as descriptive as possible. I also ask them to try to capture a moment in time or a scene in nature. Below is a page you can provide for students to record their field notes. Click HERE to download this FREEBIE!! Time to Write Once you return from your hike, it is time for students to turn their field notes into haiku. Ask them to write two to three poems based on their experiences and observations. They can write these drafts in a writer’s notebook or journal. Have students share their poems with you and their classmates for feedback. Then have them choose a final haiku to publish. Since students are using haiku to “capture” a scene or moment in time, you can have them use the Polaroid page below to record and illustrate their haiku. This page is also included in the free download!! These “snapshots” make a beautiful bulletin board for students to display their haiku!! This activity is the perfect way to ease students into writing their own haiku. It gets them outside to observe their environment. What better way to inspire nature themed poems, than going outdoors to explore?!?! If you are looking for more poetry activities, check out this blog post on my blog, Create Teach Share. You can also check out my Poetry Toolbox in my Teacher Shop!!

Download and post these FREE Figurative Language Posters for your learners to use to remind them of the terms and definitions.

Read about eleven different ways to meaningfully incorporate art in ELA class. Keep the focus on students' learning, not their artistic abilities.

Teaching poetry in the upper grades can seem like a difficult task, but this poetry unit will walk your students through 11 forms of poetry and and 8 elements of poetry. The end product is a complete book of original poems! I'm very excited to announce that this Poetry Pack unit has been completely updated! I first came out with my "Poetry Pack" on TPT back in April of 2012 and it quickly became my best seller. I've gotten really great feedback on this product over the years as I know it was a big time saver for teachers looking to teach a poetry writing unit to their students. However, over the years the old design quickly became outdated. It is new, improved, and better than ever! I took a 20 page project and turned it into 50 pages! Here's a look at the newly revised unit: Each poster teaches about the form of poetry and it includes a poetry example. (All the poems were written by me!) If you look closely at my Ode example, you might notice that I dedicated my Ode to Rachelle! Isn't her Melonheadz graphic absolutely perfect?! One thing I'm really excited about is that you now have two options for your student poetry books. You can choose the blank pages or the guided interaction pages. I've always used the blank pages because then students have more creative freedom to do what they want, but the guided instruction pages walk students through writing each poem. I feel it is a great option for students who need extra help or just as an easier way for students to write their poems! As some extra bonus features, I have a Teacher Information Page, Table of Contents with teaching tips, a grading rubric, an extra page for Concrete Poetry that includes shapes for extra practice, and bulletin board headers in case you want to turn your poetry posters or student examples into a beautiful bulletin board to display in your classroom or hall. I hope all of these will make your job easier! Here's everything you need to know: Want to teach a unit about poetry, but don't have the resources to do so? This "Poetry Pack" will be perfect for you! It's everything you need to teach a 3 week unit about Poetry! This is perfect for grades 3-5, but could easily be adapted for younger grades too! *This Poetry Pack includes 11 forms of poetry posters and 7 elements of poetry posters. Each poster includes a description of the poem/elements and a poem to use as an example. (All poems are original - written by me.) *This pack includes a blank book of poems for your students to create their own published book of poetry. *I have also included “guided instruction pages” that you could use if you feel your students need a little more guidance during the writing process. Use these instead of the blank pages. *Bulletin board headers: Want to turn these posters into a beautiful bulletin board display? I have included letters you can cut out and use to create a poetry bulletin board. * A grading rubric is included to make grading these projects easier for you! Forms of poetry included: Acrostic Alphabet Alliteration Cinquain Color Concrete Creature Alliteration 5 Senses Haiku W-W-W-W-W Freestyle About the Author Elements of poetry included: Ode Mood Figurative Language (Simile and Metaphor) Onomatopoeia Alliteration Repetition Rhyme This unit should last about 3 weeks. Teach one poem each day and have students work on their own original rough draft of the poem. (11 days total.) Save some extra days at the end so that all students can create their own published book of poems. If you already own this product, please do and re-download this from your My Purchases page on TeachersPayTeachers for no additional charge. You get all the new features for free! If you are interested in buying this product, it is available in my TeachersPayTeacher Store here! Thank you and Happy Poetry Month, everyone!!

These visual tools allow students to synthesize learning, but some kids don't think they're talented enough to make them. A bit of creative constraint helps.

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

Find out how to use these free grammar posters in your classroom. From parts of speech, to comparative and superlative adjectives and adverbs!

Looking for 5th grade anchor charts? Try some of these anchor charts in your classroom to promote visual learning with your students.

Great Ideas And Tips For Teaching Poetry. Poetry reveals many aspects of life that they may not get to experience or witness first hand. Poetry may speak some ‘truth’ about how others live and that helps build empathy with our students. Read on for 6 ways you can set your students interest ablaze for poetry! Grades 4-12 | Middle School ELA | High School English

I love poetry and I want to share how I break down my poetry unit and teach different poetic forms. The upper elementary and middle school years are a great time to dive in and get kids excited about poetry!