Sometimes, tackling a novel in your classroom is just too much—too much work at the moment, too much reading for some students, and too much collaborative work for your current kids. But what are you supposed to do to get all those reading comprehension skills covered?  State testing is a fact of life, and kids need to strengthen their comprehension. ✅ Would your students like to compare and contrast cowboys from the Old West and samurai from medieval Japan? Click on the picture to see the resource ✅ Would they like to read about Legos? Click on the picture to see the resou ..read more

 One autumn night, when the wind was high,And the rain fell in heavy plashes,A little boy sat by the kitchen fire,A-popping corn in the ashes;And his sister, a curly-haired child of three,Sat looking on, just close to his knee. Pop! pop! and the kernels, one by one, Came out of the embers flying; The boy held a long pine stick in his hand, And kept it busily plying; He stirred the corn, and it snapped the more, And faster jumped to the clean-swept floor. Part of the kernels flew one way, And a part hopped out the other; Some flew plump into the sister's lap, Some under the stool of the br ..read more

Some students are knowledgeable about climate change.  Others are frightened by it.  You know your students best.  Is there a way to start important discussions with some of these books? Pax by Sara Pennypacker is really about how war separates two dear friends, a boy, and his pet fox.  But the underlying premise is that it is a war over water rights that makes Peter's dad decide to leave Pax in the woods.  You can watch my video review here.   Paradise on Fire by Jewell Parker Rhodes is about the increase in forest fires in California, mostly becau ..read more

  "I want to write, I just don't know what to write about."   I wrote about using sentence starters to get kids hooked in this blog post a few weeks ago. Sometimes it's hard for kids to get invested in writing, especially if they feel they have nothing worthwhile to write about.  You know that once they get going they'll be fine, but it's getting them started that's the hard part.   I remember creating lists with students at the beginning of the year.  We were going to have a working set of possible topics, right?  Wrong.  Have you ever watche ..read more

This year's Presidential election has generated more than enough heated exchanges in the media!  I hope you discuss the election with your students but with a more neutral view.  Your students should not know who you're voting for.  But, wherever you stand, students in upper elementary and middle school need to hear about why we believe in democracy, and how very much electing our future President and Vice-President plays a part in it. You want your students to learn about the election.  So why not make learning about it a teachable moment with a reading passage that inf ..read more

 I was always intrigued by how students viewed writing.  Most said they hated it (at the beginning of the year) but with practice and a variety of writing activities, they came around.  What intrigued me the most, though, was how much more they jumped on writing when they were given a fun prompt or a sentence starter. In my last few years in the classroom, we needed to focus on informational writing, especially text-dependent responses, because our 6th graders struggled with responses on state testing.  A lot of time was spent on RACES, which I wrote about in this blog pos ..read more

It's getting to be that time of the year when you're trying to keep kids from tuning out, right?  For some of you, the end of the year is a week or two away.  For others, you still have a month or more. This is the perfect time to get students working on my hands-on projects.  I have a variety of project-based learning resources that might be helpful at this point in the year.   I didn't want them to stop reading though, so time for independent reading was still a priority, as was our read-aloud.  Read-aloud was about as sacred a time as I could maintain in m ..read more

 Why do we put Essential Questions on the board?  Is it to make our school districts happy or is there another purpose? As middle-grade ELA teachers, we're constantly striving to create engaging and thought-provoking lessons. Where, in all of that, do Essential Questions belong?  I believe that putting Essential Questions on the board can be a quiet game-changer. What is an Essential Question? An essential question is a broad, open-ended inquiry that provokes deep thought and exploration. It's not a question with a single right answer but it serves as a catalyst for discussion ..read more

 Giving kids a chance to explore topics they're interested in - add a bit of research, some fun travel, and a design element or two and you've got yourself an engaging exploration for kids.  They're involved in the work and you can see their strengths, both academic and social, and areas that you need to reinforce. I think project-based learning and even adaptations like this one are great opportunities for kids to shine in various ways.  If you read my blog at all, you know that blending subjects is one of my loves!  My travel projects get kids to research US geography and ..read more

There are so many good ideas for students to get to know each other on the first days of school, but if you're like I was in 6th grade, by the third or fourth day, those activities dropped off in favor of practicing routines and getting to the business of learning. Here are a few tips for those first few days. 1. Get kids moving It can be for something as simple as quiet reading time.  In my classroom, you could read anywhere in the room, but you needed to have everything with you once you settled in.  That meant having tissues if you had a runny nose, making sure you had your pencil ..read more