After years and years of holding seminars in my middle school ELA classroom, I have come up 6 tips you can implement to help you and your students get the most out of a seminar session! I believe these tips help my seminars run effectively in ALL of my classes (yes, even that class that can’t handle hardly anything) Click to see if there are any tips you can add to what you’re already doing!
Read MoreMotivating those fun middle schoolers can be tricky, right? Here are three incentives classroom tested incentives that you can implement right away to help manage your middle school classroom and make it fun! Seriously.
Read MoreThis is your one stop spot for how to teach Chasing Lincoln’s Killer to your students! I have complied everything I have learned from the years of teaching with this novel, so you can save time and have access what works! This post details exactly how I approach each chapter and specifically outlines the strategies I use to engage students and encourage analytical thinking.
Read MoreIn order to teacher one of the most engaging novels I do all year, I have to front load and build tons of back ground knowledge. What better way than to use the countless primary sources from the assassination. This is the step by step guide to how I pump up their prior knowledge with primary sources.
Read MoreUp until this point, a lot of our students have just focused on plot, characters, POV, setting, etc. as independent concepts. This is how I got my students to go beyond thinking about story elements in isolation, and to start looking at how they work together and interact.
Read MoreThis one skill I have taught my students is something that is not only super useful for them right now, but it something that can be applied to all subjects throughout their academic career. This is WHAT I teach them and HOW I implement it on a consistent and daily basis!
Read MoreWow. Some days are just a struggle in the middle school ELA classroom. Trying to get 12-14 year olds to focus on reading for an extended amount of time takes some work and energy. After watching my students float off into la la land after 15 minutes of reading, I knew I had to come up with a way to keep them engaged during extended readings…
Read MoreKeeping students focused, motivated, and engaged during testing can be challenging. Not only is this little reward is super easy to implement and keep going, but it also provides encouragement and recognition for a job well done!
Read MoreI love to think about my beginning teaching days when I did not have systems set into place. How students would be absent, and I wouldn’t even realize it. Then they would come back the next day and bombard me with ‘what did I miss? What did I miss?’ questions. And then there was never any consistent follow through on my part to make sure the assignments were turned in.
Finally, I created some forms to help establish some systems and procedures…
Read MoreI don’t know why today was they day, but it was. I mean, I’ve done it this way for years. But, for some reason, today was the day that where it became glaringly obvious: the way I was doing gallery walks to showcase student work was not meaningful or engaging. This is how I fixed the problem between class periods and instantly increased student engagement.
Read MoreIt look me years to find the perfect notebook set up for my ELA class. I went through sections, interactive, and unstructured styles, but could not find anything that worked for me until this…
Read MoreDo you have students in your class that seem to get overshadowed? That struggle to get their thoughts out as fast as some of your other students. I saw this happening when I was asking questions, and knew something had to change. This is how I got my quieter students and those who need a little bit longer processing time involved…
Read MoreWhen my lessons started to turn my classroom into something you would find in a 1980s movie, I knew I needed to change. Reworking the standards into bite sized pieces was just what my students (and me) needed! Here is how I did it…
Read MoreI think it was the crumbled paper and defeated look that got me to change how I do this one thing.
Read MoreNo one in my class had any idea that the quiet boy who sat at table one had it going on. That his responses to our novel were insightful and went beyond the basics. It probably would have stayed this way and he never would have become a contracted response expert if I didn’t do this one thing….
Read MoreI am in awe of those teachers who can turn their classrooms into a mini Disney World overnight. I scroll Pinterest, save the ideas, dream a little, but secretly know that in this season of my life these amazing classroom transformations will live in the magical world of Pinterest Land. And that’s ok. I can still set the stage to engage without all the time and effort! In fact, this idea only took me less than 5 minutes to set up!
Read MoreRETHINKING GRAMMAR LESSONS
When I think of grammar lessons, I'm transformed to my 6th grade classroom where my teacher is standing at the blackboard {with chalk and everything} diagraming sentences. I remember looking around at the bored faces of my classmates, the eyes rolling back, and drool puddling on the desks.
I knew I had to do something to make my grammar a little more exciting!
I know you have that one class that pushes all of your buttons. For me, it's my first period. It is a group of 15 students who failed language arts last year. All together. In one class. To top it all off, it's almost all boys. Apathy and attitudes run deep and wide. After about a week of frustration, I knew that traditional teaching was not going to work. Even if I'm upbeat, excited, and throwing all of my best stuff at them. It was like putting on a show to an empty theater. So now in this class we do a little bit of language arts, and a whole lot of mindset work.
It's a little something I call Life Class.
