Get ideas for teaching the six syllable types to your students, details about my Syllable Types Resource and a FREE syllable types activity to get you started!
January is rolling along and my kids (both my school and actual kids) are finally readjusted to our routine after winter break. While in real life, I find January-March the three most difficult months to
In our classroom we have been learning all about prepositions. I usually hate teaching grammar, but these hands-on reading units have made it so much more fun! Pinterest I started off by introducing prepositions with a song… These songs were PERFECT!! If you play them, be prepared for a classroom of little singers that will […]
Wooo Hooo! Did you know that Wal-Mart carries tie dye duct tape??? I love this stuff! This week I used it for our "Swat the Staff" game. Seventh and Eighth Graders played this game to review treble clef pitches. Choosing from a wide array of flyswatters, students paired up to speedily swat the correct note.
Let's take a little peek in a day in first grade! I love my job and working with the kids, tap to get some tips and tricks you can use too!
Short A is usually the first phonics sound you teach in kindergarten and first grade so I figured it'd be a great sound to show you teaching...
Crossing the midline activities for kids. What on earth are those? Sometimes in the educational world we start speaking a slightly different language than 'normal' people. Not that teachers aren't normal ... though ... you do need to be a little insane to work with small children all day long, don't you? Anyways. I had
There are several major benefits for incorporating close reading into
Your complete guide to unlocking the meaning behind palm linesImagine if you held everything you ever wanted to know about your fate, love life, and personality in the palm of your hand.
Have a chatty class? Do your talkative students get louder and louder during small groups until it feels like chaos? Do they talk when you'r...
Free instructions and printable cards for the Taboo ESL game. This is a fun speaking activity for English learners that will get your students involved.
This is a fun worksheet to practice pronouns with your EFL students.
If I Were a Superhero Identify a few well-known superheroes with your students and brainstorm adjectives that describe these superheroes and their actions. After reviewing the list, ask students to identify people in their real lives that possess these characteristics. Ask students to complete this thinksheet and describe what kind…
As you probably know, phonics is an essential component of reading instruction. Before you read this loooong post all about how to teach ph...
Teach your child to recognize and read consonant digraphs /th/, /sh/, and /ch/ with a digraph garden!
People often find the distinction between metaphors and similes a difficult concept to master. Teaching these subjects using fun activities makes the challenging topic easier to learn. These activities do not take much preparation, but get your whole class or group involved. Be sure to provide your students with lots ...
What are your methods for teaching vocabulary? Drills? Flashcards? Yuck! Boring! While these can certainly be effective, they can be a quick way to lose your student’s attention if you spend too much…
In first grade reading comprehension is something new, challenging, and difficult to teach because even though they’re all 6 or 7 they’re developmentally so different. Head over to my blog to get this comprehension page. Depending on what grade you teach it’d be great for: homework individual assessment small groups partners intervention challenging gifted students ... Read More about Reading Comprehension
This is a fun worksheet for beginners to practice the present simple tense for he/she/it words by adding an -s.
I have to admit that when I first began teaching, I honestly had NO idea that you had to teach kiddos how to think in their brain….to my credit, it was 17 years ago… YIKES!, was it really 17 years ago? Teaching kids how to THINK can be a very complex and lengthy process. […] Read more...
These five fun word games will have your students practicing vocabulary terms without even realizing it! Check out this list for instructions for play.
Teaching grammar and language art skills can be a challenge for anyone. How do you hit all of the skills...effectively? How do you know your students are
Fairy Tale STEM Activity - Goldilocks and the Three Bears Try a hands-on STEM challenge with Goldilocks and the Three Bears! This STEM activity is designed for lower elementary kids. I am so excited to share some details about it! STEM tales introduce the youngest budding engineers to STEM, by taking a familiar story and using it to walk through the engineering design process. Do you love telling and re-telling stories with your kids? Do you ever change the ending to spice it up a bit? That's exactly what STEM tales is all about! Integrate Literacy and STEM with Fairy Tales The 8-page book provides an alternative ending to this story. Your students need to help make a bed for Goldilocks. Goldilocks is simply a printed out figure, which you can add weigh to with either small masses, pennies, or washers. Using whatever crafting materials you have handy (index cards and tape are really all that is needed, but feel free to use other supplies as well), create a new bed for Goldilocks. The Testing Phase of the STEM Challenge Is the bed large enough? Will it hold the weight of the figure? You will be surprised at the designs your students come up with! Designing and creating a bed for Goldilocks is a way for students to bring the fairy tale alive. After you have tested out the beds, it's time to introduce the bear family to the challenge (mama, papa, and baby, who is the same size as Goldilocks). You will add heavier weights to mama and papa bear, and then test the designs again. This is a great way to demonstrate why it's important to know your design criteria before starting a STEM challenge! Mama bear may fit on some and not others, or papa bear may fit but weigh too much and collapse the bed. Get the Goldilocks Fairy Tale STEM Challenge Here is the link to the full resource. In addition to all the steps above, the 8-page story book guides students through the engineering design process and also includes a self-evaluation check list. Or pin the idea for later: How to Conduct a STEM Tale Challenge To read more about how to conduct a STEM challenge, visit this post: To see all posts in this series, click here:
Crack the Code – Penguin Facts – Codebreaker Worksheet Going along with the Cold theme, I thought we could learn a little more about some of the animals from the colder regions, specifi…
Origins of the cup song It’s a craze that has swept over schools everywhere and contrary to popular belief, the […]
This is a fun and different way to read a text with an interesting topic. Would you be able to live without money? Read and find out how this person managed.
Reading Response activities will likely form a major part of your reading programme, whether you are running guided reading groups, a daily 5 system,
On a scale of 1 to 10, how techie would you say you are as a teacher? Personally, I'm pretty tech-savvy. I use Google for a lot more than questions, I handle Adobe like a
How has your summer vacation been going? Mine has been both relaxing and busy at the same time. I have been working like a busy bee planning for my mid-August nuptials! If you follow me on Instagram, then you’re definitely up to date on all things wedding! I’ve also been making more of an effort...
These engaging strategies to incorporate movement in the classroom are perfect for the fidgety students & kinesthetic learners in your class!
It's that time of year! Magic e! I love teaching my kids about the magic e because it means they have really grown as readers! I know th...
In today's post, I'll share 10 quick, meaningful “follow-up” activities that you can use in your guided reading lessons - all materials are FREE!
In this six part series on How to Teach Spelling, this third post discusses and provides teaching resources for teaching the eight conventional spelling rules.
Peek At The Week Monday, September 10 ~ Hearing Screenings (Mrs. Clemetson) Monday, September 10 ~ Community Tax Meeting (6:30 pm) &...
Almost ready to read? Boost your early reader's skills with these stories and sounds.
Understanding characters can be tricky! Learn my favorite strategies for helping students master character traits and changes.
Getting kids excited about annotating text is a challenge. Using SNOTS not only helps students annotate text, it's engaging and fun.
I'd like to start this post by throwing my past teacher self under the bus. That's right, I can honestly tell you that I made a lot of ...
Comprehension activities and interactive anchor charts for Stellaluna with a freebie summarizing page for 1st, 2nd, and 3rd grade students.
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.
Supercharge your morning work with I Heart Literacy! Each page features a fun theme so your students will not only be practicing reading and ELA skills, but will also be learning about a curriculum-based topic. A wide variety of Common Core skills are addressed. Try these five free pages for free! Happy Teaching! Rachel Lynette ... Read More about Morning Work ELA and Reading Freebie!
Too many classroom icebreakers require students to take big social risks with people they barely know. Or they don't really help students get to know each other. Or they are just plain cheesy.
There are so many engaging resources and activities that can be used to help 2nd grade students master verbs!
