Independent reading plays an important role in the upper elementary classroom. My entire teaching career, I’ve known nothing but reading workshop and guided reading. I’ve never had a reading series to use, so I’ve spent an absurd amount of time researching and testing various reading resources, so I could implement that best strategies and practices […]
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I desperately want to be a crafty person. I see people with these amazing DIY projects, and I try to replicate those projects, and it never works. Never. That’s why I have to stick to easy Christmas crafts! If it can tangle, break, spill, smear, shatter, crack, wilt, it will happen when I try. Every
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There are SO MANY fun ways to make economics activities engaging and hands-on for students, and it’s a great way to incorporate a little math into instruction. This post shares some of my favorite ways to teach economics to upper elementary students. I begin my economics unit by teaching about goods and services. I have
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Students love these 4th grade Christmas math centers! From fall through Christmas I have have so much fun with my students, and seeing holidays and events through their eyes makes everything a little more special. This can be a great opportunity to engage students in meaningful math tasks that reinforce a rigorous curriculum. I’ve recently
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I recently posted Force and Motion Stations in my TpT store. You an use these as centers or stations, or as individual force and motion worksheets. In the activity, I tried my best to give clear directions, but sometimes a picture is worth a thousand words. I want to share ideas from the stations with
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Keep reading for a mega collection of Christmas activities for the classroom, because I’m not sure if you’ve heard the news, but Christmas is coming. While fun and exciting, this can be an incredibly busy and stressful time of year. To help you out, I’ve compiled a mega collection of Christmas activities for the classroom
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Like fractions, introducing decimals is something that should be taught for deep conceptual understanding in order for students to be successful in high level math classes. It can be easy, even tempting, to breeze through a decimal unit, but students need plenty of opportunities to explore decimals with manipulatives and pictorial representations, and reason with
There are so many new resources that allow teachers incorporate technology into the classroom that it can be overwhelming at times. I’ve found that it’s best for me to slow down and pick a few things that I want to focus on and learn well. Otherwise, I do a lot of things poorly. I also
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We’ve all taught the student who appear to refuse to make any effort at all in the classroom or the student who constantly gives the shoulder shrug and the dreaded, “I don’t know”. This can all be attributed to learned helplessness, which is the belief that behavior does not control outcomes or results. A student
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Let’s be honest, we’ve all been there. Wondering how many more days we can take it, much less years. Teaching is hard work. It can be a physically, emotionally, and mentally draining career, and it’s often a thankless job where teachers are typically portrayed as the reason for all of educational shortcomings. We’re expected to
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