Developing Social Emotional skills is an essential part of student learning. Facilitating and navigating kindness with first graders can be challenging, but our efforts are so important! Spending time in our classrooms on activities and conversations that focus on teaching children the importance of being kind to others is time well-spent. My SEL: Kindness Unit is interactive and filled with a variety of kindness oriented activities. I use it throughout the school year starting with back to school, continuing through World Kindness Day in November, Random Acts of Kindness Day in February and ..read more

Volume of writing is important for beginning writers. There are MANY reasons that writers may not produce a high volume of writing. The best method I've used to increase the volume and quality of writing in my classroom is taking the Status of the Class. It's been a game changer in my classroom. Taking Status of the Class helps me know where each writer is at in their current piece of writing. It's a couple of minutes worth their weight in gold. I take a few minutes at the beginning of each writing work time to have each student report which stage they are at in their current piece of wr ..read more

My firsties have SO much fun writing personal narratives during Writer's Workshop. In order to help my writers see themselves as writers that see stories everywhere in their lives, I invest extra time in building their mindset around choosing topics to write about. Writers Workshop is one of my favorite things to teach and I sharing teaching tips for teaching writing. While launching writers workshop and throughout the school year, it helps all children to view their lives from a writers lens. This is true for writing personal narratives, poetry, friendly letters, and any unit of st ..read more

Even though many writing curricula no longer include a unit on writing friendly letters, I find that spending a couple weeks on a friendly letter unit is a fabulous way to build student understanding about author's purpose and to practice writing conventions like capitalization and punctuation. Plus, I also love that writing a letter is typically not intimidating to writers just beginning to develop their writing confidence. This friendly letter unit is set up to run for about three weeks long. Based on the needs of your writers, you might go longer or shorter. Different groups of students ..read more

Readers develop at different rates and in different ways BECAUSE they're all different. Regardless of where you stand on the Science of Reading, I'm guessing we can all agree that we need to do our due diligence with each individual child. This means lots of things...especially that we get to know each child's learning modes and adjust our instruction flexibly and accordingly.  For some students, rote memorization of sight words works...but not for all students. Some readers can easily see known word parts inside of unknown words and decode across the unknown word automatically...but no ..read more

Even though I teach at a public school, I feel that God is at work in my classroom every day. Student and school shooting tragedies weigh heavily on us all. On social media recently, I saw something that really didn't sit well in my mind and I've been wrestling with it quite a bit. You may have seen it (or something like it), too. It said: Dear God, Why do you allow so much violence in schools? signed, a concerned student Dear Concerned Student, I'm not allowed in schools. God Initially, I couldn't quite figure out why it was so unsettling. It's been in the back (and front) of my mind si ..read more

As a veteran classroom teacher of 24 years, I have worked with several students with autism over the years and my heart and mind have expanded with each of them.  Having read some of Temple Grandin's books in the last ten years or so, I was thrilled to see a picture book about her! Thanks, Innovation Press, for the review copy - my students and I love this book and had excellent discussion around it. It's told by Julia Finley Mosca in rhyming lyrical form with gorgeous illustrations by Daniel Rieley. This post contains Amazon affiliate links, where I earn small advertising fees thr ..read more

Have you noticed an increase of both diagnosed and un-diagnosed anxiety in your students over the last few years? I sure have! I'm starting year #23 of teaching and have concerns about how much anxiety I'm seeing in students these past few years. Each student's story is their own and particular to them, but I will say that I just can't help but think that increased testing and pace of life at school and home play a role. Anywhooo, I am making a deliberate and concerted effort to keep things calm and peaceful in my classroom and started the first days of school centered on four statements wit ..read more

Writers Workshop has been a important and delightful part of my classroom for well over ten years. My first grade students and I absolutely adore writers workshop! Yet - I'm still in a constant state of refinement and tweaking of my writers workshop. Here are some tried and true tips for what has worked well for me over the years, regardless of the writing curriculum I was using...Let me know which tips you find most helpful! Make sure to pin this post so you can come easily back to it when you want to add more layers to your workshop or have more questions. Heads up - this is a MONSTER B ..read more

For many years I have bought into the idea of strategy groups, yet have struggled with the planning. I've tried sticky notes, notes in composition notebooks, class grids and who knows what else, in my efforts to capture all the thoughts I have about students as I'm looking over their work. But then I had my instructional thoughts all over the place and it was more challenging to plan and follow through. Having it on one document has really helped! About two or three years ago, as I was going through student writing and my head was filling with potential teaching points (and celebrations) for ..read more