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Planning for Monthly Literacy Team Meetings
You hit home runs not by chance, but by preparation. Roger Maris October is when the "honeymoon period" has usually ended for teachers. It's the month when students show...
Flash Forward with New Students
In my experience, student scheduling begins in the spring and is not finalized until midsummer, at best. However, this year, our principal pledged to make a change. Not only did...
Goals to Habits in First Grade
When I sat down to confer with Grace, I was surprised when the focus of the conversation quickly changed to my own reading, specifically a reading goal that I had...
Goals in Small Groups for English Language Learners
The past few months have been a steep learning curve for me. After nine years in a fourth-grade classroom, I moved to a literacy interventionist position, in which I pull...
Self-Assessment and Goal Setting
It was the end of the school year, and we were busy reflecting on our growth in my fourth-grade classroom. Today the students were completing a self-rating scale on various...
Independence in Writing Workshop
Writing workshop is a tricky thing. When all is going well, there is a sense of calm purpose in the air: the minilesson does not stretch into a maxilesson, and...
First-Grade Reflections: Looking Back to Move Forward
It was the first day back after winter vacation, and I looked at the plans that I had penciled in the week before break. “Review reading workshop expectations: independent reading,...
Fresh Starts Through Community Building
If you had been looking for me on the first day of school, you would have found me in our bilingual second-grade classroom wearing only one shoe. The classroom teacher...
Flexible Seating: Mid-Year Tweaks with Book Nooks
Midwinter blah weather was creating cabin fever in my classroom, and I started thinking about design ideas to bring new life to our classroom. My students completed a Room Design...
Parent Book Clubs
This year, one of our district goals was to improve and increase our communications with families. We accomplished this partly by using Google Classroom and sending updates to families about...
Better Parent-Teacher Conferences
I have a love/hate relationship with parent-teacher conferences. Or rather, a love-hate relationship with the ongoing inner conversations I have about conferences. I’m not referring to the meetings and conversations...
Getting to Know English Language Learners All Year Long
After a refreshing summer, many teachers come back to school with a notebook full of ideas about how to kick off the school year. Our plans and notebooks include a...
Coach and Principal Relationships
Clarity creates competence. Richard DuFour One of the first questions a new instructional coach asked me was “Who’s on my team?” Her question gave me pause because I was...
Preparing Teachers for Reading Over Breaks
I have been following the clean eating trend for quite some time and finally took concrete steps to clean up my diet to better protect my health and well-being. I...
Evaluation Season
We just finished hunting season in my hometown. This is a lovely time of year, with hints of winter peeking through sunshine and crackly leaves. But there is a lot...
Building from Strengths
“It’s going to be a wonderful day.” When I wake up, before I even get out of bed, I try to say those words to myself. I feel silly, but...
Speech/Language Pathology and Literacy: Making Connections
Throughout the course of a school year, teachers who have some concerns about a particular student often approach me to talk it through. They may tell me they feel something...
More Productive Workshops
As we turn the corner from the beginning of the year, many writing workshops become humming hives of productivity and progress, and some don’t quite get off the ground. What...
Building Specialist Capacity
Specialized teachers and paraprofessionals are tremendous resources for classrooms, and the many adults who work in schools want to teach meaningful lessons to students. They just don’t know how. One...
Preparing Students for Winter Break Reading
One of our worst teacher nightmares is the way January can feel like September all over again. We love and look forward to the break in December just like anyone...
Reaction and Intention: Rethinking the Library in Early Winter
I was browsing through my files in Google Drive, looking for something else, when I ran across a presentation that was a few years old. One slide confidently asserted that...
