I was a creative writing and psychology major in college. (Would you like fries with that?) Needless to say, I had to go back to graduate school almost immediately to acquire a marketable skill set. Nevertheless, my love of writing and of teaching writing has never waned. Teaching persuasive writing…
I love author studies. One of the main reasons is because students of all ages can study the works of one author and begin to see authors as real people. Another is because studying books allows students to interact with those books on a deep and meaningful level. There are…
If you're a teacher, you are currently teaching a Dorothy (someone who is being tormented mercilessly, yet is forging on), a Beans (a bully), a Mutto and a Henry (bystanders), and a Palmer (someone who just wants to be accepted and is confused and hurting in his own way). I have found that reading Wringer aloud to my whole class (sometimes 2 or 3 classes depending on the year) is a great way to broach and discuss these painful coming-of-age topics. The bonus is that in all of my years as a fifth grade teacher, I have never taught a student who has read it! It makes for a great read aloud experience filled with surprises.
It's holiday season and we all know how hard it is to keep students engaged and learning. One of my goals this year is to help students develop their vocabularies. I created two "ugly sweater" activities - one for homophones and one for synonyms and antonyms. Yesterday, my students worked…
If you're anything like me, you have difficulty keeping up with the mountain of papers that needs to be graded on a daily basis. As someone who loves and wants to preserve our environment, I also hate making copies of exit tickets to grade. In Google Classroom, I have had…
Here is my latest creation that can be found on Teacher's Pay Teachers! I taught this lesson on Friday, November 17th and it was a great success! My students LOVED the story. Finding the main idea and the theme of a text can be challenging. I find that repeated teacher…