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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.

Not Your Granny’s Grammar: Create Intentional Transfer to Writing

Patty McGee offers strategies to intentionally help students transfer their grammar knowledge to authentic writing experiences in this final installment of the Not Your Granny’s Grammar series.

Not Your Granny’s Grammar: Grammar Manipulatives

Grammar manipulatives create a helpful scaffold to allow students a chance to play and practice, leading to a greater likelihood of transferring skills to their writing. Patty McGee shares a few ideas for grammar manipulatives.

Not Your Granny’s Grammar: So Long, Grammar of Yore

Patty McGee positions us to consider a fresh approach to grammar instruction in this first installment of a three-part series.

Say Cheese: Sharing Photos to Increase Family and Student Engagement

Most teachers have, at some point, taken a picture of their class or a particular student and shared that photo with a family, but what if teachers became more intentional about taking and sending pictures? Tiffany Abbott Fuller gives practical ideas for using photos to increase family engagement.

The Influence of the Classroom Library

Heather Fisher writes a bold article addressing the many questions educators are facing about their values and beliefs when it comes to our classroom libraries in this time of a heavy emphasis on phonics instruction and decodable books.

Rhyme and Reflect: Fostering Fluency Through Poetry

Joanne Emery recommends using poetry to help children practice their oral expression. She offers many poetry books and strategies for fluency practice.

What Is ORF Anyway?

Dana Murphy reminds us that teaching students to read faster is often a surface-level answer to a much deeper question. Reading is a complex process; if you’re wondering what to do about oral reading fluency scores, then Dana offers powerful encouragement.

Helping Kids Lead Every Day: Differentiate with Precision

Tammy Mulligan shares three ways to precisely differentiate small-group instruction. This is the third installment of a three-part series.

One Size Does Not Fit All: Flexibility in Tool Creation

Sometimes, we ask students to conform to tools that we’ve already created or have found success with when working with former groups of students. However, one size does not fit all. Melissa Quimby shows us how we can be inspired by moments of productive struggle and consider how to help a tool fit our students rather than the other way around.

How to Intensify an Intervention

What happens when students’ reading data takes a downward trend? Dana Murphy encourages us to be confident and intensify a reading intervention with three practical moves.

Helping Kids Lead Every Day: How to Deepen Small-Group Discussions

Tammy Mulligan shares the step-by-step process she uses with her fourth-grade students so that their small groups are fully managed by students and her teaching is focused on their needs as readers. This is the second installment of a three-part series.

Vertical Conversations to Create Coherence

Jodie Bailey shows how representations and models help students understand complex math concepts. By participating in vertical conversations, teachers can strengthen our own understandings of skill progressions and help students develop essential connections and deeper understandings.

Building Thinking Classrooms in Literacy

Inspired by Peter Liljedahl’s Building Thinking Classrooms in Mathematics, David Pittman applies instructional practices to get students thinking for themselves as readers and writers, and to be drivers, not consumers or mimickers of someone else’s way of doing things. 

Booklist: Books that Cultivate Kindness

It’s easy for students to forget to show kindness, especially in the gray days of winter. Joanne Emery shares a powerful picture book called Two Sandals, Four Feet by Karen Lynn Williams and Khadra Mohammed and illustrated by Doug Chayka. She includes a list of additional titles to inspire kindness in your classroom all year long. If you love discovering new books, you’ll appreciate this list!

Welcome, Everyone!

When Gigi McAllister says the library is a place for everyone, she means everyone! As a child Gigi did not like reading, so she is passionate about creating a space in the library where everyone feels like they belong.

Giving Kids Time and Space to Show Their Brilliance

Mallory Messenger suggests three instructional moves to provide time and space for students to show their brilliance. This is a must-read for anyone who wants to position students to learn.

Whole-School Animal Research

Gigi McAllister shares an annual school-wide research project she leads in the library. You’ll be inspired by the way a focus on research can bring joy and belonging to all students in all grades.

Quick Take: Everyone Owns the Learning

Tammy Mulligan wants the kids to own the learning in the classroom. Here is one way she helps reinforce the message that everyone has something to offer the learning community.

Quick Take: A Classroom of Belonging

Tammy Mulligan shares the first steps to help students develop a sense of belonging in the classroom.

Feedback Writers Will Use

Vivian Chen offers insights into the conditions needed to help writers value feedback. She discusses written and verbal feedback, as well as AI-generated feedback.

Uplifting Independent Reading in the Living Room

Gwen Blumberg offers ways to make the library a welcoming space for readers to settle in with their choice of books. Classroom teachers can consider creating a living room, too.

Writing About Reading: A Search for Authenticity

In this powerful essay, Leigh Anne Eck challenged herself to read a complex text and discover the authenticity of writing about reading. She transferred her experience to create meaningful opportunities for her students as they write about their own independent reading.

Quick and Easy Reading Responses

Tara Barnett and Kate Mills offer three ways for students to write a quick and meaningful response inspired by their independent reading.

Sketchnoting in the Library

Gigi McAllister shares how she helped her students get started with sketchnoting during read aloud time. Perhaps like Gigi you aren’t a natural at this format, but you’ll be inspired by the value and ease of introducing this powerful note-taking technique.

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