Content Category: Choice Literacy
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Getting More from Wonderopolis
Franki Sibberson uses Wonderopolis with her 4th grade students, helping them learn to research and dig more deeply at the site.
Poetry Minute: Forms and How to Teach Them
In the same way that artists learn the rules of form and color before they experiment with ways to break the rules, students often feel more comfortable writing poetry when...
Supporting the Transition to Middle School: An Elementary Teacher’s Perspective
As the month of May rolls around and our state testing is completed, my focus shifts to our district’s required database for my fifth graders as they transition to three...
What Information Is Good Information? Smooth and Effective Transitions to Middle School
With each passing year, I accumulate larger piles of data about my incoming middle schoolers: spelling inventory scores, Developmental Reading Assessment scores, state test scores, and district diagnostic scores. Yet...
The Big Fresh March 16, 2013 Temptation and Willpower
I generally avoid temptation unless I can't resist it. Mae West Lately I've been reading and thinking a lot about willpower -- how individuals build or lose focus and...
Transitions Are Like Underwear
“I don’t need you to confirm or deny this, but I’m pretty sure you are all wearing underwear right now.” The fifth-grade students looked up from their journals quickly. “We...
Kindergarten Moments Count: Question of the Day
One of the struggles I feel as I try to make every moment count in my kindergarten classroom is the pull between incorporating the scripted reading program and using best...
Letter Practice Transition in Kindergarten
Mandy Robek "warms up" her kindergartners' brains for literacy work with a simple one-minute alphabet activity.
Transitioning to an E-Book Reader in Eighth Grade
Katie Baydo-Reed works with Mike, an eighth grader who is using an ebook reader for the first time.
Getting Rid of My Teacher’s Desk
Several years ago I read an article where a teacher mentioned giving up her desk in the classroom. The rationale had been that she didn’t use it if the kids...
The Truth About Building a Writing Community in Middle School
I teach four sections of English Language Arts to seventh and eighth graders. Early in the school year, I set out to create a community of writers. I wanted my...
Building a Reading Community with Edmodo
Several years back I had the joy of hearing Donalyn Miller speak. At some point during the session she talked about teaching students how to be independent readers. She said,...
Supporting Introverts in a First-Grade Classroom
When your work speaks for itself, don’t interrupt. Henry J. Kaiser It’s Saturday night as I sit to writing this. I have a mug of tea, a blanket, my...
Shared Reading to Explore Writer’s Craft in First Grade
Katie DiCesare's first graders reread a favorite text in pairs to work on noticing the details of writer's craft.
Goldilocks and the Three Bears: Reading and Community in Kindergarten
Mandy Robek leads her kindergartners in a shared reading and performance of the classic tale Goldilocks and the Three Bears.
The Big Fresh March 9, 2013 Without Cheating
Besides the noble art of getting things done, there is a nobler art of leaving things undone. Lin Yutang In tiny print at the bottom of an article titled,...
The Big Fresh March 2, 2013 Notes
We write to remember our nows later. Terri Guillemets When I was in graduate school in the 1980s, I was fascinated by the research project of my favorite English...
Make a Note
By mid-January, any child in my classroom will tell you that I am forgetful. I make a point, in fact, of forgetting things they tell me, all of the time. ...
Introducing Annotation in Eighth Grade
Katie Baydo-Reed introduces the concept of annotating text to her eighth-grade students.
Shared Reading and Annotation in 6th Grade
With the Common Core swiftly coming to many classrooms, I hear a lot of talk about rigor and shared texts. One of the challenging shared texts in my sixth-grade classroom...
Sketching Trees in Winter
Squatting down behind a stone fence, the trees at the top of the hill, as familiar as my face, look oddly new, uneasy, like the whitening air between us. Quiet...
