Latest Content
New Words for the New Year

Jan Burkins and Kim Yaris have a fresh take on goals for the new year.

Explore: Time for Nonfiction

Andrea Smith uses Explore Time with her fourth graders to build interest in nonfiction.

The Power of a Hashtag

Katharine Hale looks at the value of hashtags in helping students harness Twitter in a reading community.

Twitter in the Classroom

Katherine Sokolowski and her students find Twitter is an essential element in their fifth-grade reading workshop.

Choosing the Right Tool for Your Message

Julie Johnson has advice on classroom uses of tech resources.

Classroom Management and Student Responsibility

Katherine Sokolowski is discouraged when she observes that some students are off-task during literacy workshops. She decides a reflection sheet will be a useful weekly scaffold to support independent monitoring of behavior.

Don’t Judge a Book by Its Cover: Teaching Book Choice Strategies to Middle Schoolers

Katie Doherty helps students make choices for independent reading.

Organizing Craft Minilessons

Mary Helen Gensch concludes her series on crafting your own minilessons with tips on organizing and storing your plans.

Integrating Short Videos into Minilessons

Katherine Sokolowski gives advice on how to add video to your literacy minilessons.

How to Notice: Mining Children’s Books for Craft Minilessons

This is the second installment in our new series on creating your own writer’s craft minilessons.

Reading Math: Starting with Visuals

Maria Caplin finds launching her math minilessons with an image helps her students read math problems in deeper ways and notice mathematical components of everyday life.

Shallow Books? Learning from a Reading Celebration

Franki Sibberson discovers we allow students to assess what reading matters most to them, we can learn a remarkable amount.

Reading Workshop in Kindergarten: When and How to Launch

Clare Landrigan and Tammy Mulligan share wise advice about launching workshops in kindergarten.

Letter to Franki Sibberson’s Students

Here is a letter Brenda Power wrote to Franki Sibberson's students about why adults observe children, if you're looking for ways to explain the presence of adult visitors in classrooms.

Grading in Literacy Workshops

Katherine Sokolowski finds grading student work in her fifth-grade classroom becomes far more interesting when students take responsibility for choosing what will be graded.

Learning to Observe: Inviting a Parent to a Tutoring Session

Max Brand brings a mother into the assessment process and teaches her what to observe as her child reads.

Multicultural Series Books

Shari Frost is alarmed when she realizes how rarely children of color are represented as main characters in book series. She decides to compile a list of multicultural series books.

Character Traits and Vocabulary Development

Gigi McAllister shares how she combines vocabulary instruction with analysis of character traits in her fourth-grade classroom.

Finding Craft Minilessons in the Children’s Books You Love

Mary Helen Gensch explains how to find craft lessons in beloved children’s books. She uses a mentor text with an engaging main character to describe the process. This is the first installment in a three-part series.

Eight Picture Books That Show (vs. Tell) How to Be Mindful

Jan Burkins and Kim Yaris continue their series on teaching mindfulness with picture books.

Slow Thinkers

Gigi McAllister realizes she is a slow thinker, and this makes her reconsider some of her classroom practices to support children who need more time to respond.

Supporting Introverts in Literacy Workshops

Kim Campbell has suggestions for ways teachers can help introverts have more say in literacy workshops.

Making Space: Entering Lessons Mindfully

Jan Burkins and Kim Yaris explain how to slow down and enter lessons more mindfully. This is the first installment in a three-part series on mindfulness in classrooms.

The Silent Period

Do you have English language learners in the silent period in your school? Stella Villalba has tips for teachers working with them.

Inform, Inspire, Instruct: Essays as Mentor Texts in High School

Kim Campbell shares her favorite nonfiction short texts to use with adolescents.

Infusing Informational Texts into Morning Meetings: Fact of the Day and Daily News Routines

Andrea Smith explains two routines, Daily News and Fact of the Day, which are key components of her morning meetings.

Shorter Research Projects: Rethinking Notetaking Strategies

Katherine Sokolowski is assigning shorter research projects in her fifth-grade classroom as a way to help students acquire notetaking skills and understand the boundaries of plagiarism.

The Weight of Stories

Some of our students lead such hard lives. Christy Rush-Levine explores how teachers can keep from being dragged into the undertow of the most difficult situations children face.

Rethinking Technology: The Power of Student Experts

It’s impossible to master all the new technology resources available in classrooms, and fortunately we don’t have to. Katherine Sokolowski enlists peers as tech experts in her fifth-grade classroom.

Peer Evaluation of Student Writing

Megan Ginther found she was spending too much time responding to student writing, and just as important, taking on too much of the responsibility for improvement. She tackled the issue by developing a new program for peer evaluation of student writing.

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