It's one of the big paradoxes of literacy instruction - students best learn how to read and write independently when they have a strong community of support in classrooms. How teachers build those thoughtful, kind, and challenging classroom communities is explained in these resources.
Melanie Quinn shares lessons from the fire that burned down her school.
Basketball’s March Madness has many possibilities in schools. Tony Keefer tries a similar format with brackets and voting for March Book Madness.
Franki Sibberson’s fourth-grade students share results from the weekly science challenge.
Franki Sibberson uses Wonderopolis with her 4th grade students, helping them learn to research and dig more deeply at the site.
Maria Caplin shares how and why she began to collaborate with Gretchen Taylor, a sixth-grade teacher who would soon be the middle school teacher for some of her students.
Gretchen Taylor explains her role in observing Maria’s fifth-grade classroom, and then building a relationship with students and their families.
Keri Archer makes the most of the time her kindergarten students spend transitioning into her classroom with her Question of the Day.
Mandy Robek leads her kindergartners in a shared reading and performance of the classic tale Goldilocks and the Three Bears.
Building a sense of community is complicated in middle school classrooms. Katie Baydo-Reed considers her eighth graders, and is surprised at what endures most with these young teens.
Katherine Sokolowski discovers Edmodo is a wonderful tech tool for helping her fifth graders become more independent and supportive of everyone’s reading choices.
Courtney Pawol looks at how being an introvert affects her role in learning communities, and then moves from insight to practical changes to help the introverts in her first-grade classroom.
Why is Leslie Woodhouse so forgetful? It’s all part of a not-so-devious plot to teach her preschool students the power of creating and leaving notes throughout the classroom.
Max Brand explains how movement activities in classrooms with young learners can be so much more than a brain break or “getting the wiggles out”: movement can forge potent connections between mind, body, and story. The essay includes two video examples.
Katie DiCesare leads her first-grade students through movements and a song, and explains in the debrief why movement activities are valuable for young learners.
Ellie Gilbert is deeply moved when her high school student connects to a text in a startling way. It’s one of those magic moments that keeps teachers coming back to classrooms, but is nearly impossible to share with others.
Franki Sibberson confers with fourth grader Anna to help her connect report writing with her love of animal lists.
Ann Marie Corgill questions whether her second graders are ready for peer response. She finds that with some guidance and construction of anchor charts together, the answer is a resounding yes.
Keri Archer describes her process of creating a jobs list for her kindergartners, as well as how she has adapted the tasks based on the evolving class community.
Tony Keefer discovers that his fourth-grade students need focused instruction and support to strengthen their peer conferring skills. Tony shares tips and two video examples from his classroom.
Katie DiCesare’s first graders respond to their classmates’ writing, using questions they developed together over time.
Franki Sibberson works with a group of students who want to create a collaborative blog of interviews. The discussion reveals some of the challenges of blog writing, including consistent posting and developing topics that might endure over time.
Tony Keefer previews Infinity Ring with his fourth graders, and talks about the value of book talks for building a reading community.
Heather Rader shares texts for building understanding about bullies.
Katherine Sokolowski discovers a seven-day Mock Caldecott unit is a fun way to build a reading community by predicting the winners, and Skyping with another class to share results.
Clare Landrigan and Tammy Mulligan manage to synthesize workspace cleanup, student independence, and a concrete analogy for strategy work in classrooms.
Melissa Styger invites colleagues and family members into the classroom to share their writing process with students.
It's hard to keep your teaching mojo high when standards are grinding you down. Gretchen Taylor is inspired by watching an aerial performer to consider harnesses and fearlessness in a new way.
Amanda Adrian continues her series on how teachers can scaffold and model peer conferring. In this installment, Amanda uses the fishbowl technique with students.
In this first video from a four-part series, Sean Moore leads a writing workshop focused on adding more details and descriptive language to writing. He begins with the classic Charlotte’s Web as his mentor text.
Ann Williams shares how she builds a love of poetry in her fourth-grade classroom all year long.
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