Enjoy teaching plants' parts, structures and functions with these hands-on activities. Your 3rd, 4th, and 5th grade students will love them!

Honey Bees Reading Passages and Comprehension Questions

My students have always been fascinated with karyotypes. I usually teach about karyotypes right after long unit on cellular respiration and photosynthesis, right before I get into mitosis and meiosis. Students often have a lot of misconceptions about chromosomes and karyotypes. Here are a few web resources and teaching ideas you can use when teaching […]

Without even knowing it, we are teaching coding concepts in the classroom every day.

Introduce the concept of photosynthesis to young learners with this coloring page and simple diagram.

This post was originally posted back in 2015 on my blog and has been a popular post since that time. I worked for a decade as a family counselor and elementary school counselor before staying

Teaching rocks for kids can be fun, interactive and even yummy with these creative ideas. These 15 activities and ideas are perfect for teaching science about rocks that includes the rock cycle, the types of rocks and more! You'll even love how these ideas integrate food {yum!}, creativity and songs to meet all learners. Rocks for Kids 1. Rock Formations Worksheet - Students can take what they know about rocks and use them creatively to create rock formations. This is a more artistic way to work with rocks for kids and makes a great display next to a classroom anchor chart. {Free

Here are 7 great ideas to teach ecosystems, food webs, and food chains to your students.

De nombreuses personnes porteuses d’autisme ont un déficit de théorie de l’esprit. Cela se traduit par des difficultés à se mettre à la place de l’autre et à se projeter à partir d’un autre point de vue. Comprendre le sens... Continue Reading →

Song Index

Videos, hands-on experiments, printables, and more.

Seriously I did. I would always have those kids that would just "get" it. They would clap along on each syllable like it was second nature. Then I had "the others". These students would clap along like they were at a concert. They had no idea what they were clapping for. Have you had these students? Did you do something that got it to click with them? PLEASE SHARE in a comment below! I tried duck lips, chin drops, clapping, and many many multiple repetitions. Then, last year I had a breakthrough. I had thoroughly taught letter names, and the difference between consonant and vowels before this lesson. If you have not done this yet you can read my posts about that HERE and HERE. The key is, it's all in the mouth... MY NEW SYLLABLE LESSON I had already taught my students that vowels open the mouth and consonants close the mouth. So I started by reviewing this. I asked my students, what do vowels do with your mouth? open. I am going to teach you today about syllables. Each syllable has one vowel sound in it. Watch as I say these one syllable words. dog, cat, fish. How many times did my mouth open? one time. Watch me say these two syllable words. cupcake, doghouse, robot How many times did my mouth open? twice. Watch me say this word. fantastic How many times did my mouth open? Three times Very good. So we know that vowels open your mouth. We know that each syllable has one vowel in it. So how can we tell how many syllables are in a word just by saying it? We can see how many times our mouth opens! Guided your students then to practice counting syllables in words using this method. Some students will be able to say the word themselves and tell how many times their mouth opens. Some will need to use a mirror to watch their mouths open, or feel with their hand how many times it opens. Be careful using words with lip poppers at the end (p,b) they may mistake the pop that their mouth makes with another syllable/vowel sound. Just bring this to their attention when they are ready. Here is a free list of words by syllable. I really only go to three syllables right now. They will come up with super crazy words to try...LET THEM, then they will own this skill. Have fun with words! GET IT HERE! But seriously this really helped make connections for my students. Then later they used their knowledge of syllables (one vowel sound in each syllable) to "see" syllables in the words they are reading. Give it a try! Let me know how it goes! Comment below or shoot me an email at [email protected]. Amy Next, see how I introduce Open and Closed syllables! HERE You might also like to read: How to use read and write the room to increase reading in your classroom. How I build a strong foundation in reading. Five sight word games you can play right now! Do the word wall You might like these resources to help you. Click on the product to read more.

Get your students outside this school year! We have some tried and true ideas and teacher tips to help you teach your students outside!

Introduce children to photosynthesis with this fill-in-the-blanks life sciences worksheet!

Countable and uncountable nouns are an important concept in English. In this post, I try to explain how a learner can know which category a noun belongs to.

As a beginning teacher mentor, I have the privilege of helping our future educators wrap their brains around the many components of teaching. This requires me to get my own brain back into what it felt like to start out - the details I would miss, what I struggled the most with, and the mistakes

The kids and I have been talking about words with ing added on the end. My youngest has just started coming across these words in his reading and his big sister was showing him how to break the wo…

Use these two Boggle templates again and again just by changing the letters. There are two versions, one for the document camera and one for students to use individually. Have fun! Download Boggle Template Rachel Lynette You Might Also Like:Sight Words Uno for Dolch Pre-Primer Words!Dinosaur Virtual Escape Room SamplerFebruary Calendar LoveFebruary Journal Prompts for ... Read More about Play Boggle with Your Class!

Today is the last day to enter my Weekend Wishlist Giveaway for the fabulous Maggie Tote! The winner will be announced tomorrow morning! Let's link up to share what happened in our classrooms this week. Me first! :) In math, we are working on our place value unit. Students practiced writing expanded form by playing "Bull's Eye" using a target and paperclips. They wrote their scores in expanded form (ex. 100+30+2=132). Students are also learning to write numbers in word form. To make sure they are mastering the spelling of these words, we made flashcards and "Mastery Pockets." We'll save these to use for MANY activities this year! Here's how to make a "Mastery Pocket": Step 1: Take a 2-pocket folder. Cut a semi-circle shape ABOVE the inside pockets. Step 2: Cut down the fold along the white semi-circles (in pic above) so it creates two flaps. Fold flaps down. Step 3: Use velcro dots to secure flaps down so that they create pockets that can open and close. I got these Velcro mini-dots that worked PERFECTLY at Wal-Mart in the craft section. Step 4: Print labels that say "Practice" and "Mastered" to go on each pocket. You can download mine here! Voila! Now you have a cheap, easy solution to storing flashcards that students are using to master skills. And, students LOVE being able to move cards from the "practice" pocket to the "mastered" pocket! They also love to decorate them and make them their own. ;) In science, we're still learning about animals. This week we finished up learning about all of the animal classification groups. Students created flipbooks to help them remember the characteristics of the different animal groups. I love using different textures to represent the animals' body coverings! Mammals - fur fabric from a craft store to represent hair/fur Reptiles - onion sack to represent scales Amphibians - wax paper to represent smooth, moist skin Birds - craft feather to represent feathers Fish - onion sack to represent scales Insects - a piece from a hard plastic 3-ringed folder to represent an exoskeleton Inside they wrote examples of animals that would belong in each group and characteristics of that group. (Animal Groups Flipbook from Teacher's Clubhouse) I ended my week by taking one of my SWEET students to Frankie's Fun Park for putt-putt, bowling, and games! She won a date with me from the silent auction at our school's carnival. It was a fun time and a perfect ending to the week! She won over 2,000 tickets and insisted on buying me something with them - a Gamecock Hello Kitty! I'm pretty sure it's going to bring my Cocks good luck tomorrow...maybe I'll take it to the game -ha! Gotta love those sweet students! ;) What happened in your classroom this week?

Talk about a difficult concept with the help of a book! Plus, check out our tips for reading to your kids to increase comprehension.

Hello Everyone! What a great day to start a study on clouds!! Dark clouds this morning releasing a deluge of rain! By 1:00 beautiful clear sky with just a few cirrus clouds! Perfect example of our ever changing skies. I'll share our Cloud Unit in a second, but first I wanted to show some pics of our whole group math lesson. We are continuing our study of place value. After all the activities we did last week, it was time to see how all of this fits in relationship to other numbers. I pulled out our bigger than life 100 board and handed out some mystery picture clues. Each clue described a number in place value (tens and ones). The kids took turns putting their cards on the number for which their clue stood. When we finished putting all the clues down, a cloud was revealed! Use your imagination! It looks like a cloud, right??? The kids loved working together to create it!! I'm not even sure they realized they were growing their number sense!!! I did put together a little integrated cloud unit. We are going to try to get most of this in this week!! The unit also includes some poetry, another science activity and more!! You can get it if you click HERE!! Stay tuned for more cloud fun later in the week! Until then, have a wonderful week!! Thanks for stopping by for a peek!! Joyfully! Nancy

Your economics activities should not be boring. There are SO MANY fun ways to make it engaging for students, as well as teach vocabulary.

Homologous structures: body structures that are similar in origin (part of the body) and function (what they do). Humans, whales, dogs, and bats have similar forelimbs. This shows that they share…

HOW do I start first grade fluency ? This is a really important question! As a matter of fact I am headed to Vegas to speak on fluency at the SDE iTeach1st Conference! That's how important fluency is to me and how much it benefits my students in the literacy growth. Other super key questions are WHEN should I start fluency and WHAT materials should I use? I am nobody’s boss, but let me share what I do. FALL FLUENCY & SIGHT WORDS In the fall we work really hard on sight word fluency. I want them to master 300 words by the end of the year. They are divided into groups of 10 (30 lists) and placed into daily homework folders. The sight words are very prominent in the set up. They are half sheets and become very well worn by the end of the school year! The fluency passage is right there next to the sight words, so that both can be read easily! We practice them daily in class, during afternoon reading buddies, and for homework. We really hit them hard and play a lot of sight word games I found on Pinterest. After speaking at a kinder conference in the spring, it occurred to me that I should be doing single-passage fluency in the fall. But how would I start? What would it look like? This might be how you are feeling too. FALL FLUENCY & PASSAGES: I hit the books, “Googled” it, talked to others and, honestly, I prayed. How and when would I introduce single-sheet passages to my firsties? Shouldn’t they be turning the pages of little books in the fall? Are their “reading eyes” too new for passages? First graders are fragile and if you overwhelm them, they FREAK out. Oh my goodness could I really consider timing these babies on words per minute? Prayer, Google, Diebles, and Fran Kramer, Prayer, Google, Diebles, Fran Kramer REPEAT. This was how I spent my summer and I came up with a plan. Research told me first graders should not be timed until December or January. Shared reading is how I decided to start with a soft launch into passages. This is my pocket chart. I know this looks like teaching from 1992, but this works. I wrote out the single sheet fluency passage onto sentence strips and created comprehension picture cards that go with the fluency. I also wrote the fluency to have very readable and predictable text! In this way (Pocket chart style) I begin to model fluency, 1 to 1 correlation, and vocal intonation, rate, and accuracy. Then the kids take over the pointer and the real magic happens. I mean look at those babies! Hands in the air BEGGING to read. Be still my heart! We pull picture cards off and put them back on to encourage comprehension. I hand out the cards and when you hear the line read that matches your card you get to come up and put it on the chart. The kids LOVE getting up and reading off the “Big Chart”. We do a lot of echo reading at this point too! FALL FLUENCY & SIMPLIFIED PASSAGES: Keeping it readable is key. I really think my job in this first trimester is to help the children see themselves as readers! Many of their skills are lying just under the surface and with a little practice, luck, and love those skills will come bursting through as will a confident and excited reader. So I wrote really easy, but engaging passages. They should be easily mastered within a few days so the kids can begin to build their fluent voices! Passages come with and without numbers so that children can be timed or not. FALL FLUENCY & ART: You know that I believe art is important. There is no denying I am into making learning fun. Each passage has a darling art project and bulletin board lettering for you to display. Does a pretty room equal smart kids? No. Does an engaged child equal a smart child? More often than not. I display the art we will create next to the fluency passage on my chart to get them excited and pumped up about the passage we are reading. FLUENCY and WRITING These go hand in hand!!! I LOVE having my students write about our fluency topic. The ideas are ones they are SO familiar with! By Friday, when we sit down to write, the ideas flow easily and they can concentrate a little more on conventions. Please, God, let them capitalize, punctuate, and use finger spaces. PLEASE! I adore “processes of learning” maps, Thinking maps, or smart charts. Whatever you call them, they help the kids organize their thinking and I like that! Kids at this age level need that all year, not just in the fall! These are our Circle Maps for the healthy foods we like to eat! FLUENCY MATERIALS- Informational Text In my opinion the content read by kids in a fluency manner should be Social Studies and Science based! Kids are hungry to read about the real world. This is also a simple way to get informational reading into my day! If they are going to read a passage no less than 20 times, shouldn’t it be worth while? Shouldn’t it add to their schema? I think it should. Any of the images below are clickable. If you want to try some of the Fall units you can buy a few separately to get a taste of the goodness! Plus, of course you get the comprehension pictures to go along with a pocket chart ! Pocket Chart: Obviously pocket chart, holder, or sentence strips are not included. I am pretty sure I don’t have to say that, but you never know…. Bulletin Board Lettering and Art Masters: Great blog post on how to start teaching fluency at the start of first grade Bonus Free Resource Links and Pocket Chart Pictures: Bulletin Board Lettering and Art Masters: Pocket Chart Pictures: Bulletin Board Lettering and Art Masters: Not pictured since the kids do the art on Tuesday! I promise to update this post for sure when they complete the art! FALL FLUENCY LESSON PLANS & TEACHER HELPERS Each packet comes with easy to read lesson plans and explanations for how I run my successful program. It’s a very common sense approach. 20 minutes of your school day will turn into the most powerful minutes of your day for building comprehension and fluency! If you are hungry for more games, strategies, and materials I wrote a 101 post {here}. Let’s get these little babies reading. Let’s have some fun together in the midst of Common Core drama. Let’s just teach reading to the best of our ability with Social Studies and Science passages that matter in real life! Check out the newsletter {here} where I got to share a little fluency tip! Comprehension and Fluency I really love fluency and just cannot help but share that passion! If you have any questions, inspirations, or ah-ha moments I'd LOVE to hear them! You can always email me or leave a comment! [email protected] See Ya'll in Vegas. XOXO!!!!

Les élèves ont beaucoup de mal à distinguer la nature de la fonction d’un mot. Dys-positif vous propose deux cartes mentales pour aider les élèves à mémoriser et distinguer ces deux notions. La nature d’un mot est son identité : elle ne change JAMAIS (ex. : nom, verbe, adjectif, pronom…). La fonction d’un mot est son rôle grammatical : elle dépendra donc de la phrase dans laquelle le mot seLire la suite

Are you eager to teach English online but are not sure where to begin? Check out this list of 11 legitimate companies that you can teach English online with.

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Mama Lisa's World presents thousands of traditional kids songs from over a hundred countries and cultures! We also feature a major collection of Mother Goose Rhymes, global recipes, holiday traditions and lively conversations about childhood around the world.

Science gets REALLY interesting in 4th grade. Bones, cells, digestion, animals and more are featured here in our 4th Grade Science Worksheets. Are you ready to learn? There’s no more fun way than with worksheets. Print them all for free. 4th Grade Science Worksheets

As the story goes with most men, we're fighters and hunters by nature. So wanting to learn a form of PRACTICAL martial arts shouldn't come as too big of a surprise, and the Israeli Martial Arts of Krav-Maga is about as bad ass as it gets! Along with sambo (russian martial arts), this style of ... Read more

Our Natural Disasters Packet has notebook pages and worksheets as well as some hands-on activity ideas covering the following events: Flooding Mudslides Tsunami Tornado Hurricane, cyclone, typhoon Blizzard Heat Wave Drought Wildfire Sinkholes In this packet you’ll find one page on each of these events. Often, natural disasters occur because of geologic changes or extreme weather conditions. Students explore the cause of each of these events. They also find out what ...

Picto-Crosswords are coming your way! You can combine these with the other Road Trip themed puzzles to create some fun puzzle packs for your kids to enjoy on those long summer road trips. They'd be great for plane trips too! Or even one of those rainy days when you can't be at the beach. :-( Just click on any of the pictures to download a pdf file containing all the puzzles with answers. I've included two versions of each puzzle in this pack. One version has a Word List included for kids who need help spelling some of the harder words. The other version has no word list, so should prove more challenging. The Signs puzzle shows the signs without their words, so these will be even MORE challenging! Good luck!

Get everything you need to make your habitats and organisms unit come alive! Games, videos and more!

This is the first in a series of graphics planned to look at the chemistry and uses of some everyday chemical compounds you can find in a variety of products around your home. The series was inspired by conversation with @chemtacular on twitter...

HOW DOES MUSIC, COMBINED WITH MOVEMENT, AFFECT OUR BRAIN? Our brain is a big mystery. It has the capacity to make art, create it, receive it and react to it. Dance is a form of art where emotions are expressed through grace of movement. As scientists study the brain’s response to art, they found marvellous discoveries. Most of the remarkable ones pertain to the music used in combination with the dance movements. People respond to tragedies more than happy endings. OUR BRAIN IS A BIG MYSTERIOUS FACTORY OF IDEAS Being intellectual is most widely accepted by the society as the greatest potential of a human being. But the brain along with the heart is driven most of the time by passion. Undeniably, passion speaks from the soul. And purely being intellectual is not enough for the soul to stay as alive and functional. It needs something abstract and it needs to be refreshed. In order to stay anew, creativity lies in the curious mind. And this is how new things and ideas are generated. Elizabeth Gilbert, writer of “The Big Magic” encourages people to stay curious. And according to her, it is the secret in living your life to the fullest. BASIC FACTS ABOUT OUR BRAIN: Photo credit to: Google Images through www.postris.com If your skull would be opened, the brain made up of gray matter would be revealed. It is divided into 2 hemispheres: the RIGHT hemisphere and the LEFT hemisphere. The RIGHT hemisphere connects to the left side of the body from neck down. That’s why when your dominant hand is left, you are most likely inclined to embrace arts more than numbers. The gray matter extends to the spinal column which our backbone protects. The spinal cord branches out into nerves that connect our brain to our extremities. This makes the brain the commanding centre of everything that we do. The earlier fact is important to understand paralysis. When people get paralysed, diagnosis had to state the origin of the injury. Say, when the person ends up with paralysed legs, his lower back got injured. And that is why, if the person got injured from the neck down, the brain could still remain functional as in the case of Christopher Reeves. Since the brain is the commanding centre, it has full potential of developing non-stop. In fact, it needs to be stimulated to stay functional. It is safe to say, when you keep idle, certain parts of the brain becomes paralysed too. DANCE AS A FORM OF ART AND HOW MOVEMENT IS RECEIVED BY THE BRAIN Washington Post had featured this wonderful article about how the brain actually reacts to movement in combination with music. As a performing artist, sharing this wonderful discovery brings us into a special kind of awareness. It touches on how storytelling is so effective since the time of ancient playwrights. Wonderfully, it features the art of dance. It’s interesting how varied movements actually extract certain emotions. As you read the article, expect animation and music. And gauge yourself on how you become engaged to it with the help of these certain stimuli. https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2017/lifestyle/your-brain-on-art/?tid=sm_fb&utm_term=.9f65ff189564 As we have mentioned earlier, the brain is a mysterious network of ideas, abilities and potential. In conclusion, what you put into your brain is what will be manifested into our actions as it justifies its very nature of being a commanding centre. What you think and what you internalize most often is bound to be channelled outwardly. And to that, understand your responsibility on how to nurture it. Hear the music, watch somebody dance and respond freely to what you see.