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Here is where you’ll find all the latest print features from our contributors. If you’d like to browse specifically by grade level, topic, or contributor, you can use the links in the right sidebar.
Latest Content
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
All the Writing Things: Putting Writers in Charge of Their Writing
Inspired by coding time, Suzy Kaback works with her students to develop an All the Writer Things tool to help writers reflect on their work as writers and become stronger and more efficient.
Five Things I’ve Used AI for This Week
From lesson planning to generating decodable texts, Dana Murphy shares five ways she uses AI as a reading interventionist.
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.
And the Winner Is… Planning and Implementing a Mock Book Award
Gwen Blumberg shares a school-wide approach to a mock book award experience. This clear step-by-step guide with a rich resource download makes it possible to implement in any school.
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.
Letting Go and Trusting Students
Becca Burk turned to her students when her class needed an idea for a school-wide door-decorating contest. She was reminded of the importance of trusting students and uplifting their voices.
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.
What Just Happened? Download a Behavior Sheet
Becca Burk shares her new learning about how the brain responds to trauma and the way she uses neuroscience to help respond to challenging behaviors in her classroom. Download a practical behavior sheet to help guide your responses to tricky behaviors.
Listening In Raises Student Voices
Mandy Robek knows how to nurture inquiry and collaboration in her classroom. She shares a process for supporting whole-class projects.
Community Circle
Bitsy Parks reminds us of the importance of taking time to talk, ask questions, and share thinking in a circle format. Community circle is a practice that strengthens an inclusive community.
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.
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