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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.
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Rethinking Resources: Pausing to Reflect on Old Favorites
Gigi McAlister shares a vulnerable story of realizing a read aloud text she used for many years was racist. She urges us to pause and examine the material we are using with students through different lenses to ensure that we are providing positive learning experiences for all students.
Shining the Light on Truthful Histories
Melissa Quimby advocates for us to become educators who shine light on truthful histories. To do so, we must carefully collect and examine the resources we are using with students.
Making the Case for Reading
Gretchen Schroeder makes a case for independent reading to administrators, families, and her high school students. Gretchen offers notebook entries, scholarly articles, and whole-class activities to help everyone know the benefits of consistent, daily independent reading.
Purposeful Ways to Incorporate Interactive Writing at the Start of the Year
One of the instructional methods we love the most in primary classrooms is interactive writing. It allows us to target the needs of our learners as individuals and reinforce the phonics rules we’ve been studying whole-class, builds community by co-creating something together, and gives us a chance to use our learning in real, authentic, and purposeful ways. Tara Barnett and Kate Mills offer simple ways you can use interactive writing to co-create your classroom space with your students.
Talking Back: A Strategy for Annotation
Tiffany Abbott Fuller gives us everything we need to use an active reading strategy. By the time you finish reading this article, you’ll be prepared to teach this strategy, equipped with sentence stems for students, specific ideas for instruction, and an anchor chart for visual reference.
Hidden Lessons: Are We in Control of Who We Become? (Part 4)
In this final installment of the “Hidden Lessons” series, Gretchen Schroeder turns to perhaps the most complicated question of all: To what extent are we in control of who we become? It’s a question that touches on issues of identity, personal responsibility, outside influence, and human nature, all of which are especially relevant during adolescence. Gretchen includes another booklist to support this conversation.
Authentic Audiences for Writing in School
Our student writers deserve to have authentic audiences. Tara Barnett and Kate Mills share two opportunities for authentic peer audiences for finished writing pieces in school. Finding space and time for student writing to be seen and heard by their peers in meaningful ways is essential.
Writing in the Wild: Bringing Back Authenticity
Vivian Chen offers big and small ways to make writing instruction more authentic and engaging for your students.
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.
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