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August 22, 2025: Welcoming Everyone!

This week’s newsletter is about creating a classroom community that positions students to learn.

Hidden Lessons: Why Do Relationships Matter? (Part 3)

By the time they reach high school, many students have learned how to survive change, but not always how to make sense of it. They’ve lost friendships, switched schools, experienced family transitions, or even dealt with grief. While they may not always talk openly about these experiences, they often find reflections of them in the books they read. Gretchen Schroeder continues her series about using literature to help students learn important social and relationship skills. She includes student work and a booklist.

Classroom Tour: Flexible Seating

Mandy Robek shares a variety of seating choices students have in her classroom. She explains the reason for her choices and how she manages a classroom where no one has an assigned seat.

I Am a Listener Who…

Melissa Quimby challenged herself to unpack her identity as a teacher who listens. She discovered clear and repeatable actions that all educators can use to be intentional listeners. Schools become safer spaces when students feel heard. What new things might you try to create a safer space for children?

Building Trust in Our Classrooms

Tara Barnett and Kate Mills remind us that more important than the physical layout of the classroom or the assessments we’ll give is the type of community we’ll become. Building a brave and enthusiastic community of learners is the foundation that everything else stands on. They share a community-building experience that can be adapted for any age.

August 15, 2025: Positive Approaches to Change

This week’s newsletter is about ways to keep a positive attitude toward change.

Wheels: Adapting to Change on the Roller Derby Track and in Your Teaching Life

Gwen Blumberg is inspired by a challenging roller derby practice and sees parallels for teachers who are facing challenging situations with changes to literacy curriculums. If something is shifting in your life, this article is sure to offer you confidence in moving forward.

Walking a Teaching-Readers Tightrope: Finding Balance Between Beliefs and Expectations

Hannah Tills offers a much-needed metaphor for all teachers who are implementing a new curriculum resource. Rather than thinking of the new expectations as part of a pendulum, Hannah encourages us to think of walking a tightrope. She offers ways to stay rooted in student engagement, student access, student choice, and teacher autonomy while also meeting expectations of a newly adopted curriculum program.

Classroom Tour: Manipulatives and Books

In a classroom tour, Mandy Robek shares the thoughtful ways she pairs math manipulatives and books while providing easy access to the tools for students. She also promotes engineering and design with access to building blocks and parts.

Hidden Lessons: How Do We Cope with Challenges and Change? (Part 2)

Literature gives students a safe space to learn about struggle, resilience, and emotional growth without requiring personal vulnerability. Gretchen Schroeder offers a way to focus students’ independent reading to explore coping with challenges and change in life. You won’t want to miss the included young adult booklist. This is the second installment of a series.

August 8, 2025: Anchor Charts

This week’s newsletter is about anchor charts.

An Ode to the Anchor Chart

In a world where anchor charts are becoming digitized and developed by curriculum publishers, Bitsy Parks reminds us of the power and importance of co-creating anchor charts with students. She outlines key steps and ways to adjust anchor charts to connect with students and improve engagement.

Four Ways to Use Anchor Charts in the Classroom

Tiffany Abbott Fuller provides a practical and fresh approach to organizing anchor charts in meaningful and helpful ways. Don’t miss the action-oriented summary at the end of the article to put these ideas into place in your classroom.

Classroom Tour: Kinds of Spaces to Help Learning Blossom

Mandy Robek takes time to consider different places students will use in the classroom. She considers books, portable learning spaces, and the way learning will blossom over time in her third-grade classroom.

Hidden Lessons: Integrating Social-Emotional Learning in an Authentic Way

We know there is a need to teach more lessons about wellness, and we know that it is sometimes difficult to teach those lessons in a way that students will accept. Gretchen Schroeder offers three questions for teachers to consider as they plan to incorporate social and emotional learning standards into their classrooms. This is the first installment of a series.

August 1, 2025: Simple Joys

This week’s newsletter is about simplifying the start of the school year.

Books Are My Management Strategy

Becca Burk reflects on the power of reading as a way to set routines and help nourish healthy regulation.

Creating a Space

Gwen Blumberg clearly outlines different kinds of spaces for our classrooms and libraries. She was inspired by David Thornburg’s Learning Space model where he suggests creating campfires, watering holes, and caves to support different kinds of learning.

July 25, 2025: Let’s Get Started

This week’s newsletter is about getting started with the new school year.

June 27, 2025: Restore, Refresh, Rejuvenate

This week’s newsletter is about inspiring renewal.

June 20, 2025: Choice Numeracy

This week’s newsletter highlights Choice Numeracy.

June 13, 2025: Generative AI (Part II)

This week’s newsletter is about generative AI.

June 6, 2025: Generative AI (Part I)

This week’s newsletter is about generative AI.

What Would You Do?

Tammy Mulligan uses role-play to help her class process different ways to respond to challenging behavior situations. In this video clip, Tammy shares the rationale behind this practice and gives us a glimpse into her students role-playing a situation and their conversations about possible responses.

Setting Personal Goals for Math Independent Work

Mallory Messenger delivers a step-by-step guide to setting personal goals in math. Inspired by the practice of setting independent reading goals, Mallory explored the benefits of personal math goals. Download the Student Math Goals Self-Assessment and Reflection.

A Literacy Project Needed Math

Mandy Robek shares the way a Mock Caldecott project naturally connected to the math work happening in her third-grade class.

Developing Flexibility with Number Lines

Jodie Bailey offers clear and concise ways to use number lines as a tool to solve many different kinds of problems.

Beyond “I’m a Third-Grade Teacher”: The Power of Role-Specific Prompting in Educational AI

Brian Sepe helps us understand the importance of prompting and offers a framework that will help us be more intentional and specific to leverage AI for our needs.

Can AI Help with Assessment?

Tara Barnett and Kate Mills explore using AI to help with grading student writing. In this practical and insightful article, they share a process for using AI as a co-teacher and their reflection on whether it helped them save time (nope) and made their feedback more useful (yep). They share a downloadable student literary essay reflection sheet that you might want to use in your classroom, too.

May 30, 2025: Nourish Independence

This week’s newsletter is about nourishing independence.

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