Content Category: Choice Literacy
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The Big Fresh December 10, 2017 The Kid Teaches You
Let the child be the scriptwriter, the director and the actor in his own play. Magda Gerber Ruth was a participant in a writing retreat I was hosting at a...
First-Grade Conference: Stretching Writing
Katrina Edwards helps first grader Dylan stretch out his writing with details by having him talk through playing with friends near his home.
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...
Teaching Fifth Graders to Make Peer Recommendations
Katherine Sokolowski scaffolds Liam and Caden through the process of learning to recommend books to each other.
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...
The Big Fresh December 3, 2017 The Perfect Space
We shape our dwellings, and afterwards our dwellings shape us. Winston Churchill When the realtor took me into the house almost two decades ago, I knew it was meant to...
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...
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...
More Productive Writing Workshops
By early winter, many writing workshops have become humming hives of productivity and progress. But some haven't hit their groove. What to look for and what to do about those...
“If You Like” Reading Recommendations Conference
Katherine Sokolowski confers with fifth grader Taryn, connecting her love of Rick Riordan books with other reading possibilities.
Better Writing Response Groups
Peer feedback is something we value for ourselves, and so we’re always looking for ways to improve the quality of feedback our students give and get. In middle school, we...
Using Podcasts as an Alternative to Article of the Week
Like many teachers, I have been using Kelly Gallagher’s Article of the Week activity in my classroom for several years. At the beginning of the year, this activity is great:...
Focused Revision: Introductions
As I sit at my computer, trying to start writing this article, each blink of the cursor on the blank white page is a recurring taunt of “Start! Start! Start!”...
First-Grade Minilesson: Repeated Phrases
Bitsy Parks uses mentor texts and her own writing in a minilesson on how her first graders might use repeated phrases in their writing for more impact.
QR Code Listening Stations
Many classrooms have a listening station to replicate the benefits of classroom read-alouds in literacy stations. Yet, in my experience, listening stations are one of the most difficult stations to...
Tips for Student Podcasting
“I wish this lesson was on the radio so I could listen to it over and over until I understand it.” That was all I needed to hear from Alex....
Teaching Revision in Middle School
The pre-assessment prompt for our first unit of writing reads, “Please keep in mind that you’ll have 45 minutes to complete this, so you will need to plan, draft, revise,...
The Big Fresh November 18, 2017 Grounded
I wish you a craft you can never learn — but can keep learning as long as you live. Don Murray The older you are, the more the quick passage...
Writers and Themes: Fifth-Grade Discussion
Author Jennifer Richard Jacobson talks with a group of fifth graders about how writers establish a theme early in stories and then braid elements of the theme throughout the text....
Writing Empathy
I write stories about my daughters. Not made-up stories. Real stories about their childhood and our family. I write about Maddie’s first loose tooth and the way Katie always smells...
