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…
I’ve got a new parts of speech video to share with you today and this time it’s about verbs! I love to practice songs like this one and my noun song during those extra two to five minute chunks of time that pop up now and then. Help your students remember…
One year I had a juggernaut of a word wall (how’s that for vocabulary?…haha!) Adding a word frequently involved standing on precariously stacked kid-sized furniture or trying to check if a word was straight from an awkward crouch with my head held sideways. Each day when I read my students a picture book, I…
Kids love music and it’s so helpful for memorization! I’ve written before about using music for learning parts of speech here and here. I’ve had a few people say that they wish they could hear the songs instead of just seeing them on a chart. I’ve been getting my feet wet with video lately and…
If I were ever on a game show and asked to name all 50 states in alphabetical order, I could absolutely do it. And it’s not because I have a savant-like memory, it’s because in 8th grade we learned a song that listed all states in ABC order. I might not remember much else from…
There are lots of things you won’t learn about teaching during your time in college. How to start up your literacy block at the beginning of the year and what you should be teaching in phonics are on the list. Making attractive bulletin boards is another one of these topics. Back-to-School bulletin boards welcome your…
Make addition with regrouping simpler! If you have laid a solid foundation in place value, your students are probably ready to take on addition with regrouping. Kids can quickly get lost in what number to carry and where to write it. Fortunately, there’s a teaching aid hiding right in your desk drawer…the versatile sticky note!…
This sounds crazy but stay with me for a minute ; ) It works like this: *Explain or review that the short hand points to the hour. *Point out all of the little tick marks around the clock. Count them all together to establish that there are sixty. Explain that the long hand shows how…
Research about and best practices for teaching spelling in the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd grade classroom. Do you ever feel like your teacher prep program left you with some major gaps? Like, how the heck do you really teach spelling? We’re probably all familiar with the technique of assigning lists and testing at the…