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Next-Thing Thinking and Google Keep
When I returned to work after the birth of my first child, I struggled to balance my new role as a working mother. As the coordinator for a local reading...
Why We Like Independent Writing Projects
It’s Friday morning during writing workshop, and 21 writers are scurrying around our room, gathering their materials: writer’s notebooks, writing folders, special revision pens. Some students take out a Chromebook,...
Eating Poetry
Ink runs from the corners of my mouth. There is no happiness like mine. I have been eating poetry. Mark Strand Mark Strand’s character ate poems. I like that metaphor,...
Spoken Word Poetry
For once, the security light that never goes off in the corner of my classroom was useful. Beneath this makeshift spotlight stood a stool from my kitchen counter and my...
A Book Tasting for Teachers
Where do you turn when you need your next book to read? If you are like me, you have a few methods up your sleeve to ensure your next book...
Forest Bathing
Some days you need to hide from possibility, step barefoot under a green cathedral of trees, breathe their essential oils. Feel the elixir dissolve in your blood like the slow...
Professional Learning Beyond PLCs
Professional learning communities, or PLCs for short, is a framework for professional collaboration and data analysis. The structure this approach creates allows for collective inquiry around student learning. Since coming...
Inspiring Students to Revise
If I had a dollar, maybe even a quarter, for every time I heard a young student tell me they’re done with their writing piece, I think I could retire....
Choose Your Own Grammar Adventure
It is winter. You are an English teacher, and you are starting to notice that lazy grammar errors are sneaking into your high school students’ writing. You review a few...
How to Write a Sentence
It was years ago that I sat with a stack of writing folders in front of me and delighted in reading the sweet stories that my first graders had chosen...
Questioning Within Read Alouds
Throughout the year, I have been studying and implementing strategies to increase the quantity and the quality of the questions students ask within their classrooms. In the past, I have...
Leveraging Read Aloud
Nobody has ever told the language arts teachers at my middle school to stop reading aloud to students, but administrators have questioned us about the practice. As a result of...
End-of-Year Read Alouds
As we gather in our last community circle of the year, I pull out I Wish You More by Amy Krouse Rosenthal and read it to my attentive and quiet...
Building Stronger Wordsmiths
Relative location, longitude, scale, prime meridian, cardinal directions. What do all these terms have in common? These words and several more will be the focus of an upcoming fifth-grade social...
Meaningful Data
As I write this, I am in the season of becoming a runner again. Running is not something that is natural for me—either in inclination or ability. It is also...
Asking Students to Grade Themselves
During a recent field hockey game, my daughter, who is a senior on the team, was constantly on the receiving end of the referee’s whistle. “What was I doing?” she...
Leveraging Reading Assessment Benchmarks
As any primary or upper elementary teacher of reading workshop knows, reading benchmark assessments is incredibly time-consuming, often taking us away from precious conferring time. The importance of administering them...
Learning and Leading Through Teaching
Covering for a teacher is more valuable than any observation. Putting myself into the shoes of the adult in the classroom is both revealing and humbling as a building principal....
Settling In
“Okay, writers, off you go,” Mrs. Smith says with a smile and a wave of her hand. The first graders scurry to their writing spots and open their writing folders...
Not All Superheroes Wear Capes
Doldrums. One of Merriam-Webster's dictionaries defines doldrums as "a spell of listlessness or despondency; a state or period of inactivity, stagnation, or slump." Inevitably, we all get the doldrums at...
Never Too Late to Get to Know You
Has your staff started down the trail of the winter doldrums and grumpy-pants syndrome? What is it about this time of year? The holidays are over, and spring break feels...
