Inside: Seesaw is an app for online learning. Can it simplify and improve your instruction? Find out inside! In the spring of 2020, teachers suddenly needed a way to deliver instruction from a distance. How would K-2 students complete work on a computer? They are slow typers. They need to draw and move things around.…
Inside: My 10 favorite word sort activities. Use these in your classroom or for distance learning to build up spelling and phonics skills. O n Thursday nights when I was in 2nd grade, my mom turned into a spelling cheerleader. “B clap, U-R clap, R-I clap -E-D!” she’d chant. It wasn’t that my…
Teach reading comprehension effectively using the gradual release method. Lost in a Teacher’s Guide I was brand new to Utah. Like, hadn’t even found a place to live so I was staying in my cousin’s basement kind of new. Being a planner, I had gotten early access to my new classroom and lugged out all…
Reading comprehension strategies for 2nd graders and how to teach them. This post contains affiliate links. What Successful 2nd-Grade Readers Know and How to Teach It Reading Comprehension Strategies are Like a Messy Closet You know how when you try to clean out a closet, things get complicated really fast? Soon you end up…
Reading comprehension strategies for parents, teachers, and tutors to use with first graders This post contains affiliate links. Don’t Get So Busy With Decoding that You Forget This In a school hallway lit by fluorescent lights, I sat across a desk from a student. The tip of my pen hovered over a testing booklet as…
Strategies, interventions, and activities to improve reading skills in kids with dyslexia, for teachers and parents. This post contains affiliate links. When Reading Skills Aren’t Clicking Lauren* sorted cards with -at endings into one pile and -am endings into another pile. Then she read the -at list: “Bat, cat, sat, …happy?” guessed Lauren. “Let’s use…
Inside: Follow these five steps to teach a child to read. Helpful for parents, homeschoolers, and teachers that are teaching beginning readers. This post contains affiliate links. I looked like a mother hen with my chick gathered around me. Sitting on the floor with my legs crossed, I stared into six eager pairs…
How to make reading comprehension instruction engaging with ideas from the book Disrupting Thinking: Why How We Read Matters by Kylene Beers and Robert Probst This post contains affiliate links. The Problem With Reading Comprehension Questions The book was thick and heavy with a dark blue cover. The print was small and the pictures were…
Inside: Use poetic devices to teach poetry writing lessons that will get your elementary students writing poetry in no time. There’s a little-known secret about teaching poetry writing that will blow your mind. I’m sure you’ve got a few kids in your class that would rather drop their pencil on the floor forty times in…
“And that is how we solve a compare problem!” I say triumphantly as I step away from a white board filled with pictures and numbers. “Ok, go ahead and try the next one on your own.” Quiet, blank stares, tapping pencils. No one knows what to do. That’s when I realized that I was teaching…