Articles
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
Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?
Gretchen Schroeder finds the classic dinner party assignment is a fun way for her high school students to explore kindred spirits in literature late in the school year.
The Power of Charts in the Classroom
Melanie Swider shares suggestions for making anchor charts more purposeful.
Note Taking for Research
Katherine Sokolowski helps her fifth graders build notetaking skills for research.
Student-Created Text Sets
Jillian Heise’s middle school students design text sets late in the school year. It’s a great activity for discovering how they have grown as readers, as well as a gift to next year’s class.
Choices for Paragraphs
Melanie Meehan finds third grade is a good age for helping students develop paragraphing skills.
Closing Out the Year with “Where I’m From”
Jillian Heise shares a marvelous poetry writing activity for students who are transitioning from elementary to middle school, or middle to high school.
Closing the Year and Making Space to Remember
Jan Burkins and Kim Yaris explain how ending the year is all about making space for memories, and provide some texts to help in the process.
Video for Last Days of School
Melanie Meehan encourages teachers to build a video collection of students at work to use with next year’s class.
Best Part of Me
Jennifer Schwanke shares a favorite activity for building community and self-esteem.
A Spring Villanelle
Shirl McPhillips highlights the pleasures and challenges of using a strict poetic form.
Favorite Wordless Picture Books for Teaching Inference
Jan Burkins and Kim Yaris present some of their favorite children’s books for teaching inference.
Working Hard and Reading Carefully: On Theme and Rereading
Jennifer Allen uses commercials to promote the importance of rereading to students while teaching theme.
Redefining Just-Right Books
Jan Burkins and Kim Yaris share advice for rethinking how teachers and students define “just-right” texts.
Supporting Readers with Nonfiction Text
Cathy Mere finds that criteria for “just-rightness” varies with genre.
Using Picture Books to Foster Resilience
Gigi McAllister uses picture books to strengthen her fourth-grade classroom community.
Celebrating “The Voice” of Writers
Melanie Meehan presents a fun activity for late in the school year that uses the format of The Voice television series.
Using Padlet with Students
Katherine Sokolowski finds Padlet is a great tool for compiling learning and building community.
Space to Draft
Ruth Ayres argues against lockstep approaches to the writing process.
Group Composing
Gretchen Schroeder finds group composing is a fun way to build community, writing skills, and understanding of how arguments work with her high school students.
Tutoring Carl: Sketching to Draft
Max Brand challenges himself to let a student take more of the lead during a writing tutoring session.
Setting Goals with Students
Melanie Meehan shares anchor charts and strategies for goal-setting.
Student Learning Targets
Christy Rush-Levine finds she has to rethink learning targets for her middle school students if she wants students to pursue complex and lifelong reading goals.
Rethinking Reading Goals
Maria Caplin develops a system for helping students move beyond simple goals like noting the number of pages read.
How to Speak “Friend”
Melissa Kolb shares some of her favorite mentor texts for helping preschoolers understand friendship.
Book Blurbs in the Middle School Classroom
Jillian Heise uses the quirky genre of book blurbs in her middle school classroom to model summaries and glean information about students’ comprehension, reading interests, and writing skills.
Researching Like Writers: From Read-Aloud to Notebooks
Katie Doherty finds read alouds are a valuable tool for developing middle school writers.
Intervening with Read Aloud
Jan Burkins and Kim Yaris are using read alouds as an intervention strategy with struggling learners.
Whole-Class Conversations for Read Aloud Closure
Melanie Swider discovers that conversations after read alouds are a wonderful way for students to remember and retain the learning from shared texts.
Releasing Responsibility
When it comes to producing independent readers and writers in classrooms, it’s all about the language we use. Debbie Miller has practical suggestions for bringing out the best in children.
Surviving “That Class”
Sometimes you get a class of students that pushes every one of your buttons. Shari Frost provides a case study of one teacher’s survival strategies.
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