Map-skills can be tricky for learners of all ages! This review packet is filled with tips and tricks to help your students master the concepts of Latitude/Longitude and Hemispheres. Use this product as a study guide to review for a quiz or test, or assign it for a quick and painless homework assignm...

Inside: Practical advice and tips for raising bilingual kids, from the creators of Veoleo. Raising a bilingual child takes dedication, consistency, and a lot of creativity. Here at Veoleo, we’ve broken it down to 10 tips on what you can do at home to help support your little one’s bilingual education. It feels like a daunting task,

Thinking about starting a new program with your music classes? Not sure what to do? Is this the problem…. Your time is precious, and you don’t want to waste it. Your budget is limited, and you want to get the most bang for your buck. You have limited space in your classroom to store large […]

Whether you're new to teaching or a veteran, this list has you covered for 4th grade.

Runny nose? Teach kids to blow thier own nose with these nose blowing tips and tricks. THere is more to meets the nose when it comes to nose blowing!

Because You Have a Terrible Math Teacher - School Fails

Have you ever had a class that just tried your patience day after day? Have you ever felt like you could walk away from teaching forever tom...

We may earn money or products from the companies mentioned in this post. Please see policies for more information.It’s always fun to have a few tricks up your sleeve. Over the years the boys have learned a few that they like to use to impress younger kids. This one is definitely a classic and one

We’re excited to share how to add with regrouping today! These tips and tricks have really helped Big Sister with her homework this year. First grade math has a lot of new concepts. We’ve been practicing math through play with a few new ways to practice math. We made this regrouping activity for some homework that was ... Read more

You know that collective sigh, the one that choruses around the room when you enthusiastically announce, "Class, the next unit we'll be entering into is poetry!" If poetry is taught the right way, students should be cheering at the thought of a Poetry Workshop day. Below I will outline the "why" of Poetry Workshop along with tips and tricks that I have picked up to make any poetry unit a raging success in your middle school classroom. If you like what you read below and want to implement a Poetry Workshop in your classroom, make sure you check out the Poetry Workshop resource available in my TpT store. This resource will walk you through every single step of implementing Poetry Workshop in your classroom, along with the assembly of a student Poetry Workshop binder that can be utilized across the entire school year. Lesson plans, graphic organizers, grading rubrics, and so much more awaits you in this comprehensive resource. Why Use Poetry Workshop? *It’s a change of pace. We immerse students so heavily into Reading Workshop and Writing Workshop day after day. It’s nice to have the option to mix things up a bit with Poetry Workshop. It is also a great transition between units. For instance, maybe you’ve just completed a three-week persuasive writing unit and you’re about to head into a round of literature circles. Take a day or two hiatus in between to do Poetry Workshop once the Poetry Workshop Kick-Off lessons are completed. Poetry Workshop can serve as a natural transition between the big, heavy units throughout the whole school year. *It will reach unexpected students. You may have a pretty good idea right away of who in your class excels at writing or can already read college-level material, but you may be surprised at which students soar while writing poetry. Poetry Workshop is a great way to hook in students who struggle or are unmotivated when it comes to reading and writing because it appears to be a manageable chunk. The thought of writing a five-paragraph essay or reading a 300-page book scares them half to death, but reading or writing a poem may not seem as scary. *It’s a great way to teach literary elements on a smaller scale. Sometimes it’s too daunting for students to come up with the theme of an entire book, but starting out teaching theme through poetry is the perfect scaffold before teaching theme in relation to a novel. The concept of theme will transfer perfectly between a poem and a book, but more students will understand the concept if you start teaching it through a poem all students understand and can easily read and reread. The same goes for teaching figurative language. Poetry is the perfect pathway to finding examples of figurative language and teaching them how to identify and use it. Point of view is also a great lens to look at poems through and teach students about through poetry. *It gets students to appreciate words and how words can evoke images. Poets have a gift for saying a lot with only a few words. It’s important that we’re teaching students how to be impactful writers in few words and make every word count. A poet keeps his/her audience in mind and thinks about what emotions he/she would like the reader to feel. Teaching-wise poetry allows so many pathways into teaching students about word choice, organization, sensory images, and audience awareness. *Poetry removes the need for perfect capitalization and punctuation. The poet gets to structure his/her poem how he/she wants to, and there is an art in playing around with punctuation and capitalization while writing a poem. Releasing this pressure of having to write “right” will allow students to write freely and openly. *A lot of times when we think about teaching poetry we think about having every student write a haiku, an “All About Me” poem, a name poem, a limerick, and then we call it good. Students publish a few poems, and we call it good for the year. This is not what Poetry Workshop is. Poetry Workshop gets students to read poems, analyze poems, consider techniques poets use that they would want to use, and write their own poems once they feel comfortable doing so. Teach students what poetry really is. As teachers, sometimes I think we’re afraid of poetry ourselves and then default into teaching poetry through a set of “form” poems. We hate it and are uncomfortable with it, so these views get passed right down to students. Let’s shift this attitude! Poetry can be a beautiful thing that teachers and students alike have a positive attitude about. Tips for Teaching with Poetry Workshop: Tip One: Teach Poetry in Phases I was first introduced to the idea of teaching poetry in phases when I read Fountas and Pinnell's book, Guiding Readers and Writers. Here's how I've taken the idea of phases and broken them down to work for my middle school students. Phase One: Collecting & Responding Have students read through poetry books or poetry websites, reading as many poems as they can. If they come upon a poem that they really enjoy or relate to, they can copy the poem down. I also like to have my students respond to the poems they write down in Phase One using prompts from the anchor chart below. Phase One exposes students to poetry in a non-threatening way. Students think about the poetry they enjoy. As they copy down poems, they also have to focus on how the poet structured the poem, what letters they capitalized, and how they punctuated it. Phase Two: Mimicking Techniques This is where it gets fun. Students now take techniques they've noticed other poets use and mimic these techniques to create poems of their own. Take a look at the anchor chart below to get an idea of the types of techniques students could mimic. Phase Three: Original Poetry Students can now create poetry of their own choosing. Give them the green light to let their creative spirits fly. Also discuss with them what they've learned from the first two phases that will help them as they create poetry. Check out the anchor chart below to see ideas for what makes a good poem. Tip Two: Whole Class Poetry Stalking I teach grammar in my classroom through pulling mentor sentences from our class interactive read aloud and have students "sentence stalk" the sentences by noticing everything the author did to construct that sentence. I transferred this concept into our poetry unit by having students notice everything they could about a particular poem as shown below. What has been great about poetry stalking is we have realized together words to use to describe poet's techniques. It has also been a great way to show that poetry has flexible rules for capitalization, punctuation, and poem structure. Not all poets construct their poems the same, but it's fun to infer why poets make the choices they do while writing poems. Check out this website for a great list of poems to use with middle school students while sentence stalking. Tip Three: Use Poetry Interactive Read Alouds There are so many great books out there written in verse. As you kick-off Poetry Workshop for the year with a poetry unit, consider doing a read aloud with one of the amazing book choices below to complement the work students are doing in Poetry Workshop. Tip Four: Teach New Types of Poetry Mix is up with your students by showing them poems different types of poems. Three of my favorites are below. Book Spine Poems: Give book boxes from your classroom library to students and have them create a book spine poem of their own. Blackout Poems: Copy off pages from several different books and make photocopies, allow students to select one, and then have them black out the words they don't want leaving the words they'd like to use to create a poem. Sandwich Poems: Students take the first and the last line from a poem they copied down during Collecting & Responding and write a poem filling in the middle. Tip Five: Make Everyone a Poet Show your students that everyone is and can be a poet, even you. Model the work you complete alongside your students during Poetry Workshop. Also, make sure you give plenty of time to have students share what they're doing in Poetry Workshop with one another.

Throughout my years teaching middle school, I have had the experience of seeing many "work refusals". These are the situations when kids, for a variety of reasons, just refuse to start the work you give them. They might shut down and rest their head on their desk or lash out in anger, shouting about

Self-tape auditions have become an integral part of today's online casting world for actors.

Do You Struggle with the Plot of you Novel? You might not be alone. Use these simple tricks to plot your novel plus use the bonus tools for expert plotting!

CONTINUE READING HERE: 6 Subtle Ways to Know If You’re Good In Bed

Learning lowercase letters can be really confusing for many children, especially the letters b, d, p, and g . When you think about it, it...

Most of the time I get extremely excited when I see number tricks or facts I didn’t know before. A while ago, my reaction was: “why didn’t my maths teacher learn me that?!!”…

It’s not entirely your fault if you’re terrible at math — maybe you just didn’t know the tricks to make any math problem a piece of cake. Well, now you will because Bright Side is bringing you a list of simple math tricks.

Celebrate Martin Luther King Jr. with these wonderful activities for kids.

Geometry resources for teaching and learning mathematics. Fun and visual resources for maths teachers and kids.

My elementary kids are using rhymes like ‘8 and 8 fell on the floor. They are 64!’ Does anyone know any other multiplication rhymes or tricks like this?

This is a form that kids can refer to as they are composing. It gives them five "tricks" that composers use when creating an original melody.

Whether it's the SATs, the Regents, the ACTs, any of the many state exams (here in Massachusetts we have the MCAS) or our teacher exams staying confident before and throughout the test is so important. In this post is a free PDF printout with tips for staying confident while taking tests.

Striving to get a 36 on the ACT? Read this comprehensive list of 125 ACT tips and strategies to score well.

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However, there are several good reasons to spend some time on cursive handwriting practice,

Whether you're new to teaching or a veteran, this list has you covered for 4th grade.

Maximize your marketing efforts with ChatGPT's comprehensive list of prompts. Download now on tipsographic.com and take control of email, social media, video, ads, strategy, metrics and SEO to reach your marketing goals like never before!

You don't typically learn grammar rules when you learn your native language, you just pick up on the way things are done without even knowing it.

~Click here for a list of prepositions. ~THE ENGLISH CLASSROOM ARCHIVES: ~ Well vs Good ~ Mastering the Semicolon ~ Word of the Week: No. 3 - accoutrements &nbs

Everyone needs a little extra motivation from time to time. Even doing the things we love the most can become too routine or lose focus. Here at our house, I noticed practicing was in a mid-winter slump after the holidays. We’ve been using Motivation Medicine to stay on track. This is a great little trick that ... Read More about Motivation Medicine

Geometry resources for teaching and learning mathematics. Fun and visual resources for maths teachers and kids.

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