Inside: Use this writing teaching strategy to get kids thinking of topics quickly and easily so they can get on with their work. This post contains affiliate links. Y ou give your writing lesson. Everyone has their materials. The hard work on your part is done and now it’s time for the kids to give…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
In my first year of teaching I was expected to use a writer’s workshop model where students almost always chose their own writing topics. This was before the Common Core standards and my district wasn’t very concerned about what genres students wrote in, as long as they wrote. I could definitely tell you that in my…
With winter break quickly approaching, if you can keep your class from turning into all out chaos, you’re doing good. If you actually work in some academic content…well, you deserve something special from Santa ; ) I’ve got an ugly Christmas sweater contractions freebie to help you out. Students take words from two balls of…
Inside: Teaching writing DOESN’T have to be complicated! With these simple strategies, you can improve students’ writing without having to work so hard. M rs. Braun? I turned around to an outstretched notebook in a kid’s hands. “I don’t know what to do next,” said the student. I leaned closer to decipher the…
This is the second part of a mini series about songs for teaching parts of speech. If you missed the first post about nouns and verbs, you can find it here. Click on any picture to print off a copy for yourself from Google Docs! Sing The Adjective Song to the tune of The Itsy…