Let's Talk About Food is an engaging board game that builds English language skills. Ideal for both native and ESL students in grades K-2, this printable game strengthens vocabulary around food concepts. To play, students take turns rolling dice and moving spaces. They read the prompt aloud, then verbally share or write their response. Teachers can modify gameplay for pairs, small groups, or whole class participation. Options include responding individually, with a partner, writing questions and answers, or racing to the finish. This versatile resource allows teachers to assess student progress through one-on-one conferencing. Using themes like food makes retaining new vocabulary words more meaningful. Let's Talk About Food brings interactive learning to grammar concepts through an easy DIY format. Let's Talk About Food Board Game

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A list of the most hilarious SPAM comments that try to get on my blog. Funniest Spam Comments of All Time.

A person's values are the things they believe are most important. They help to determine life priorities, and they influence decision-making. For example,...

One writer shares how doing a life audit helped her become the best version of herself.

A lot of people are on the hunt for energy efficient homes when building a new house. And I love that! I like to look over a floor plan which has been carefully thought out to maximise the sun. Did you know that you can have a ‘sun study’ done…

Shape: Square Stickers Create custom stickers for every occasion! From special mailings and scrapbooking to kids’ activities and DIY projects, you’ll find these stickers are great for so many uses. Add your own designs, patterns, text, and pictures! Dimensions: Available in 2 sizes: Large: 3" L x 3” W, 6 stickers per sheet Small: 1.5" L x 1.5” W, 20 stickers per sheet Printed on white acid-free paper Vibrant full-color, full-bleed printing Scratch-resistant front, easy peel-and-stick back Available in a matte or glossy finish Choose between 7 different shapes

Step aside, mom friend. There's a new sheriff in town.

Explore thed4rkestrose's 6955 photos on Flickr!

We know Scrum and Kanban as flavors of Agile. However, the majority of the people don’t know if they are running a Scrum or Kanban in their companies. The first step to understand this difference is…

So, where exactly is your plot taking you? What happens next? What is this story about? It’s time to think about plot. Plotting Worksheet

Go beyond think-pair-share with ten discussion strategies that will engage your students in meaningful paired and small group discussions.

Snazzy title, right? Guess I'm not feeling too creative today. But that's okay, because I spent some quality time with my computer. Summarizing, like theme, isn't just something you can teach a unit on. You have to keep coming back and coming back and coming back. It all started with this pin on Pinterest: Source: rundesroom.blogspot.com via Megan on Pinterest I thought, WOW! How easy would it be to do this run down every time we read a book? Then I can easily hit summarizing over and over and over and over and over. You get the idea. So, I decided to make my own version because I have an obsessive need to coordinate. Duh. Then, while writing this post, I decide to check out where the original came from. And it's a blog I already follow! Guess I started following after this post. The blog is Runde's Room, and it's awesome. She even has a whole fictional narrative unit to go with it in her TPT store. (FYI-I checked with her before I shared my copycat version.) Anywho, here's my version. Click on the post to download it. I would actually like to stack 10 or 15 post-its on each square in the poster. Maybe we could do something with them after we write on them? Like a mini summarizing board? I don't know. I'll let you know how that goes. Click on image to download. I had it printed at Office Max in an 11x17 poster for about $1.50. I know, I know. Good thing Office Max isn't a real man, or my husband might start getting jealous. Then I started thinking maybe a poster wasn't enough. Maybe I would want something bigger sometimes. So I made it for the Mimio. It will at least be great for the beginning of the year when I'm introducing it. You can download the Mimio lesson here. Take some time and go visit Jen at Runde's Room for some more great ideas! So what about you? Do you have any good summarizing strategies?

It's not always easy to identify relational aggression. Casual attitudes about teasing friends, reluctance to report occurrences and the sophisticated methods some kids use can make identifying relational aggression difficult. Welcome to my series on girl drama relational aggression. In this post, we will take a look at the definition of relational aggression and how to tell when it is happening. As I stated, in my first post about relational aggression, relational aggression is a type of bullying that causes harm to a relationship. The types of relationships can vary greatly; relational aggression can occur between best friends or between

What would you look like if you were a magical girl!!!!!!pls tag me in drawings of your mahou shoujos !

Ok, just because I've been gone from 'blogging land' doesn't mean we haven't been working hard in 4B. I've definitely been documenting a lot of what we've been doing! To start, it was clear to me that our old way of peer conferencing just wasn't working. Kids seemed to be goofing around, not really helping each other, and it was a waste of everyone's time. It frustrated me when most of my one-on-one conference time was spent managing unruly PEER conferences. I knew something had to change. I decided to revamp our workshop so that our peer conferences would hold both the author and the peer more accountable AND work on our 6-traits language. I introduced our 'new' method for peer conferencing using this anchor chart to document our process. After students finish drafting, they are to grab a 6-traits peer conferencing sheet and assess themselves by circling all the descriptors for each trait that they feel match their own writing. Mind you, we did a lot of whole-class practice with scoring writing based on the 6-traits criteria so students would feel comfortable doing this process on their own (and being HONEST!). Through our mini-lessons we've learned that it's possible to have high scores in some traits but lower scores in others. That's how we grow! Here you see Devin circling where he thinks his writing falls on our 6-traits rubric. (Note: The link to the 6-traits peer conferencing sheet above will bring you to an even more updated version than the one shown in this blog posting! Just FYI!) Here's another student assessing her own writing after she's drafted. This student has finished assessing her writing using our rubric. She decides on a final number score and circles it to the left of the descriptors. Then it's time to meet with a peer. (We have a peer conference sign-up sheet in our room which helps students know which other students in the room are also ready to peer conference.) Here you see this author reading his story to his peer. After he's done reading, he will explain to his peer the scores he gave himself and why. It's important for the peer to listen carefully to the author because it will soon be her turn to assign a score to this author for each trait . On the lines on the rubric, she will write to explain the scores she gives him. The peer needs to follow the following sentence stems in his/her scoring response: * I give this a writer a ___ because... * This writer needs to work on ... This process requires peers to truly work together, hold each other accountable, and it gets the kids using our 6-traits language a lot more. The second sentence stem helps the writer establish a goal for what to work on when revising! To see more of this peer conferencing process, watch a clip of us practicing this stage! Our focus lately has been on the trait of organization. We've been looking thoroughly at different beginnings and endings of both student and published writing. Here is our anchor chart documenting what we noticed! In other Writer's Workshop news, these are a few additional anchor charts we have in our room to help keep our writing organized. This anchor chart reminds us of powerful words to use to spice up 'said'! In reading we have been working hard on purposeful talk.This is so very important to the social construction of knowledge in any classroom! It's essential to teach students purposeful talk behaviors before even considering literature discussion groups (LDGs). The majority of kids talk like...well, KIDS! So, if we expect kids to talk like mature young people about different texts they read, we need to explicitly teach them how! Talking about Text by Maria Nichols is a great place to start if you're interesting in learning more about purposeful talk behaviors. I taught each of the behaviors individually through two separate mini-lessons - one day to explain 'hearing all voices' in a concrete way (without text), and a second day to practice 'hearing all voices' using text. Then I taught 'saying something meaningful' in a concrete way without using text, and the next day we practiced 'saying something meaningful' using text , and so on. Eventually all of the purposeful talk behaviors kind of blended together and kids started to discover that we often need to use all of these things at the same time in order to truly talk purposefully about anything! We did a lot of practicing, and I've been taping students in this process. Here is a clip of students practicing their behaviors while they talk about their families. (We had read a few books about different kinds of families to foster a safe environment to celebrate the fact that we all have different kinds of families!) We also had students practice their purposeful talk behaviors while discussing their best or worst memory in school (which helped warm up their brains for a timed writing activity we did during writer's workshop). Here is a clip! As a class, we watched these video clips to analyze our body language and other purposeful talk behaviors. I think taping and analyzing is a very effective way for students to learn how they should look and sound in an LDG. 'Keeping the lines of thinking alive' is a tough concept for many youngsters. Sometimes what happens is that students take turns talking, but they don't really build on what the person before them said. In other words, they don't really DISCUSS, they just share and listen. We applauded the first group in this clip because they had good body language and were respectful as listeners, but we discovered their conversation needed to be more 'alive' by asking questions and making connections to each other's ideas and thoughts. Mrs. Pierce and I taped ourselves doing a weak LDG and a strong LDG. As we watched each example, we used dots and lines to 'map out' our conversations (see chart below). In the weak LDG, we discovered Mrs. Pierce and I shared a lot of individual thoughts. The thought started, and then it stopped. There was really no discussion about anything we said; and Mrs. Pierce wasn't even looking at me during part of our time together! How rude! ;) In the strong LDG example, we mapped out a lot of dots and lines that were connected because we took each other's ideas and built on them. We truly discussed the text to dig deeper. We introduced several conversational moves for students to use to help get their voice heard in a conversation. Students also have these conversational moves on a bookmark that they keep in their LDG books. After we learned the respectful ways to speak and act when discussing with others, it was time to teach our kids how to flag their thinking. This is a crucial step to holding a successful literature discussion group because it allows the kids to track their important thoughts while reading so they have ideas for discussion the next day. Here are the 'codes' we use to track our thinking on post-its. We encourage students to use one of our codes to categorize the kind of thought they have and then write a few words to trigger their thought. This helps them when they get into a discussion group; they'll actually have pinpointed ideas to discuss! Students kept a chart in their Thoughtful Logs with all of our codes on it for easy reference. Here's a clip of our students as they practice flagging their thinking for the first time. The next day, students put all their new learning to the test. We put them in small groups to discuss the text "Slower Than the Rest" which is a short realistic fiction story out of Cynthia Rylant's book Every Living Thing. On another day, we used a high-interest two-page non-fiction text about leeches to continue practicing flagging our thoughts. Here's a clip of our kids flagging their thinking just after we modeled it during our mini-lesson. Below are some pictures of the kids' flagged thoughts. In addition to purposeful talk, we've also been studying the historical fiction genre. We've read several mentor texts, including Dakota Dugout by Ann Turner and Dandelions by Eve Bunting. Our first round of literature discussion books are all within the historical fiction genre. Here are a few of our historical fiction LDGs hard at work: Dear Levi: Letters from the Overland Trail Scraps of Time: Abby Takes a Stand The River and the Trace (I think I put my finger over the microphone at minute 2:00!) Oftentimes, historical fiction books will have a flashback in them. One group's book, called A Scrap of Time: Abby Takes a Stand by Patricia McKissick, has a flashback that occurs towards the beginning of the story. I photocopied some of the pages to try to explain this technique during a whole class mini-lesson. In the first section of the book, three grandkids are spending time with their grandma in her attic. They find an old menu and ask their grandma why she saved it. Chapters 1 through 12 flash back to 1960, where 'grandma' is just 10-years-old, living in Nashville, Tennessee at the time of a lot of civil rights protests. The menu is from a restaurant where a lot of sit-ins took place. Through the flashback a reader learns all about life during the 1960s. In the final section of the book, a reader finds him/herself back in the present - in grandma's attic, where the three grandkids ask their grandma some questions about her life during the sixties. There was also another flashback in the story Dakota Dugout by Ann Turner. We also read The Wreck of the Zephyr by Chris VanAllsburg as an example of a flashback in a fantasy book! In other reading news, here is a picture of the anchor chart that stored all the non-fiction text features we've learned. In social studies, we've been studying the economy of the five U.S. regions. Students have been reading small sections of non-fiction leveled readers to summarize a product or industry that is important to each region's economy. Students are typing up their summaries and we're calling those summaries 'articles' as they each create a magazine of our economy. Through this project, students have learned to: * Summarize main ideas * Center and left-justify their cursor * Use the tab key to indent * Change font size, color, and style * Bold, underline, and italicize * Safe image searches * Copy and paste * Cite their picture resources Here is the inside of one student's magazine. Next week we will be using this site to create magazine covers! Lastly, we had a chance to meet with our second-grade buddies earlier this month. We split the buddies up into two groups and one group stayed with Mrs. Adams to play holiday bingo. The other group was with me in the computer lab. Buddies used this site to play a variety of math and English games. One of the most popular games to play was called 'Story Plant' where students could click on different leaves to create the beginning to a unique story. Depending on what leaves were clicked, you would get a different combination of characters, settings, problems, etc. The computer generates a beginning to a story that the kids can print off and finish during writer's workshop! Have a wonderful weekend!

Just finished a re-writing my article on Jet Lag (set to publish in a few days) and it got me thinking of how darned hard it can be to travel…

We have a lovely school counselor this year who came to visit each of our classrooms and explain a common "Peace Process" for conflict resolution. I loved this for so many reasons and can't wait to share it with you! For one, common language across all grades is invaluable, especially when kids experience conflict at recess, in the lunch room, or even in the hallway when they are away from their classroom teacher and intermixed with other grades. Also, the fact that this process is broken down into such simple and manageable parts gives kids the confidence to go through it themselves, complete with sentence starters and all. I want to share this Peace Process with you in case you are looking for a way to help manage conflict and empower your students to problem-solve with one another. Feel free to download the freebie to share with others in your school, or even send home to parents... this can work with anyone in any situation! Step 1: Breathe The first step is the most important: make sure your body is calm enough to engage in the process of making peace. In the heat of the moment, the "fight or flight" response is in high gear, anger may be driving the show, and there is no way the rest of the process can be successful. By stopping to breathe, everyone can get back into a more calm state. How you breathe is just as important. Start by "smelling a flower" by breathing in through your nose and counting to three slowly. Then, hold for one count, and exhale our your mouth as if you're "blowing out a candle" for four counts. Practice this with your students and see how it changes the feel in the classroom. Some may be silly for the first breath or two, but after practicing for several breaths, the whole tone of the class will be calmer and more subdued. It's a good practice to keep on hand for other times during the day, too! Remind kids to take as many breaths as they need. This process can't be rushed, so even if they need some time alone to compose themselves, that's a-okay. I would still encourage a few common breaths together at the start of the process to be sure there's lots of fresh oxygen in the brain! Step 2: "I" Statements This is the first back-and-forth conversation that takes place. The person who feels harmed begins with a statement about how they felt. The framework of: "I feel ____ because ____" always gives kids a good place to start. During this time, the other person must stay silent and practice listening. This is important, because the second part of this step is to repeat what that person said. When the first person is done with their "I" Statement, the second person repeats what they heard, including all of the important parts, not just generalities. "I heard you say you felt ___ because ___" is a perfect launching point. At the end of their retell, they need to ask if they got it right. Person 1 needs to feel confident enough to say no, if needed, and retell the parts that were left out. This may need to happen a few times, especially at the beginning. The inclusion of "I heard you say..." is also crucial because it reinforces the idea that this is a listening exercise, not just an airing of grievances. Step 3: Repairing the Harm We want to encourage kids repair the harm, and sometimes "sorry" is enough. Other times, they may need an apology and an additional follow-up about what will happen if this occurs again. There may be something that they need or can do for one another, like get an ice pack or take turns with the item in question. There are other alternatives, too, and usually two or three actions are needed to repair the harm that was done. The important part is to make sure they are reasonable, and that both are agreeable to the ideas. Person 1 should feel that the harm is indeed repaired, or on the way to being repaired as best as possible. Step 4: Moving Forward While a physical touch may not always be appropriate, it is often a useful and effective starting point for moving forward. A handshake, high five, or fist bump can be powerful "wrap up" gestures that solidify the discussion and resolutions discussed. The important part, like the rest of the steps, is that both parties agree on the common gesture. Even a thumbs-up or peace sign can work. ... Always be sure to offer your presence and guidance, especially at at the beginning, as kids are working on practicing and internalizing these steps. After a while, you will not need to be as present, although you should always need to be available to help. Some conflicts go beyond the Peace Process and will need additional intervention by you or others to be truly effective and safe. However, I think you will find that this can be an excellent tool for navigating issues throughout the day. * As you introduce this to your classroom, have kids role-play through the Peace Process with common conflicts and/or issues that you have been hearing about. Extend the areas beyond the classroom and onto the playground, bus, neighborhood, and lunchroom. This activity will also get them more familiar with the steps and language in real-life scenarios. * An even more powerful way of incorporating this schoolwide is to have older student be "Peace Aides" and help younger students work through the process. How powerful for all parties involved! If you're interested in the freebie, click HERE to find it in my Teachers Pay Teachers Store. Have you used a process like this at your school? Do you have additional steps or any feedback? Please leave a comment and share your experiences!

What to write in a thank you note after an interview. Here are the 4 main things you want to cover and a sample template to use.

As you might have heard before, laughter is the best medicine. From my personal research, I’ve learned that laughter provides numerous physical and mental benefits. Laughing on a daily basis will enable you to relieve the built up stress accumulated throughout the day. What else…

Our brains need constant exercise to stay sharp and healthy, just like we need the muscles in our body to stay strong and fit. So let’s have a CrossFit session for your grey matter and see if you can be called a champion. Some of these riddles may look simple but don’t get too relaxed because others might have a bit of a twist. Anyhow, let’s see if you can crack them all.

As therapists we are often affected by the emotions and experience of our clients. I have often become overwhelmed with emotion when sitting across from a client. That feeling is proof that a tra…

Where to find Navy records.Links to the best online genealogy research resources to help you find your sailor ancestors.

If you’ve been diagnosed with borderline personality disorder – or know someone who has – you might be wondering what medications are used to treat BPD. Currently there are no medications specifically designed for the treatment of BPD that have been approved by the FDA. However, there are several categories of medication which can help […]

"You humans have so many emotions! You only need two: anger and confusion!"

Access Bars is an energy healing modality that allows you to release your subconscious limiting beliefs easily without having to identify them first.

Do you have students that are struggling with their parent's separation or divorce? Kids Understanding Divorce Or Separation Group Counseling Program or KUDOS is a 10 week small group curriculum that can also be used with individuals designed to help students build resiliency and coping skills to deal with the stresses caused by divorce and separation. ► Students will learn effective coping skills and strategies for dealing with their emotions, and will explore problem solving strategies, all while offering each other support and having fun. ► Sessions include: Week 1 – Introductions/Get-to-Know-You Week 2 – My Family Week 3 – Values, Marriage, and Divorce Week 4 – Feelings of Guilt and Anger Week 5 – What Can I Control? Week 6 – Changes and Having 2 Houses Week 7 – Building Support Circles Week 8 – How to Talk so Parents Listen Week 9 – Problem Solving Week 10 – Coping Strategies and Wrapping Up ► This curriculum has everything: ✔️ Pdf and Google Slides (TM) versions ✔️ Scripted Lesson Plans ✔️ Data Collection Sheets ✔️ Alignment with ASCA Mindsets and Behaviors ✔️ Parent Letters and Forms ✔️ Teacher Referral and Follow Up Forms ✔️ Counseling Passes ✔️ Pre and Post Test ✔️ Group Evaluation Form ✔️ Session Exit Slips ✔️ Worksheets ✔️ Posters ✔️ Draw It! Divorce edition game ✔️ KUDOS emotions BINGO game ✔️ Certificate of Completion ✔️ Icebreakers ✔️ Color and Black and White Versions ❤️ Check out the preview to see everything included! ❤️ ▶ How to use this counseling curriculum: Use for small group counseling sessions. Sessions can also be used separately for classroom lessons or individual sessions. ▶ What people are saying about this resource: ❝I loved that each lesson was ready to go with minimal planning. The group was engaging, and students had great discussions each week. ❞ ~ Shelby K.. ❝This resource is AMAZING! There are so many fantastic resources and activities. I especially love the creative name. I plan to provide these activities for years to come!!❞ ~Taylor G. ❝Awesome, awesome, awesome!❞ ~Julie C. ……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………… ► Need additional small group curriculum? Check these out: Anger Control Group Motivation Executive Functioning Bundle Mindful Island | Mindfulness Group Wonderfully Me | Girls Self Esteem Small Group | Girls Group ……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………… ▶ Don't forget to follow along! My TpT Store Facebook Instagram