One of my all-time favorite writing topics focuses on writing showing sentences instead of telling sentences . The anchor chart below highlights the difference between a showing sentence and a telling sentence. Basically, a telling sentence in a story is usually a short sentence that tells about an incident in a vague, uninteresting way. Simple emotion words like sad, angry, brave  or embarrassed  are common in telling sentences . Showing sentences, on the other hand, use vivid verbs, descriptive words, and creative details to describe an incident. A few years back, I wrote a blog post describing a successful writing lesson I co-taught with third grade teachers to introduce the concept of "Show, Don't Tell" to our students. You can check it out HERE . Recently, I decided to create a follow-up lesson. I wanted to highlight showing sentences written by published authors, so I combed through several upper elementary chapter books ( The Tiger Rising by Kate diCamillo,...
Winter break, fall break, spring break, or whatever breakin’ electric buggaloo you’ve got coming up —make sure to make it your own.  There’s nothing more exciting than coming home and realizing you have ZERO teaching to do for the next week or so.  No planning meetings or PLCs or bus duty in negative degrees. Just a bunch of days that you get to fill. For many of us they’re already planned out but you need to remember to take a couple of days for yourself.   Call it recharging or unplugging (I even put those in the titles) or whatever cool buzzword they got for it (right, bae?). Just make it your own. I’ve spent a little time and put together some of my favorite past times that I’ve found effective. Organize Your Classroom Before You Leave For Break Yes, you want to fly out the door when that bell rings. Just wait. Clean up your room, throw away all those piles of papers (that will just get tossed when you get back), and get your room in working order for your return. This l...
Teaching fractions is often one of an upper elementary teacher's greatest struggles.  Fractions, despite being very "visual" ask students to think differently about numbers and to be able to reason at a much higher level--a new kind of thinking for many of them. Many math textbooks move students very quickly into computation related to fractions...they start teaching them to find equivalent fractions by multiplying the numerator and denominator...having them "fill in the blank" to identify which fraction is greater, and so on.  For students who learn computation easily, we sometimes miss when some other basic understandings are missing. For this reason, I like to put my students in positions where they have to do a ton of "reasoning" and math talk to help ME learn about the level of their understanding--and for THEM to have to explain with precision their understanding.  Check out this task we did to kick off our math class last week.  I planned ...
I never know what to give my students as gifts.  Honestly, half the time I wait until the last minute, panic, and come up with some over the top corny gift.  What I have come to realize is that my students don’t expect anything from me, and whatever I do give them they like because it comes from me.  Here are a few cheap and free ideas that may help you, the busy teacher, out. Word Clouds Create a word cloud for each student using Wordle or Tagul .  Students love to read things about themselves! Scholastic Books Scholastic Reading Club always has one dollar books.  If you have bonus points, what better way to spend them?!?  Are you out of time and know you won't get the books before you need them?  Create a "Free Dollar Book" coupon for your students which will allow them to choose their own book on the next book order!  You can download a free printable coupon to give your students HERE .   Board Games Do you have old board games lurking in a clo...
Daily math review is a critical component of every math classroom. Imagine learning something new and then never revisiting it.  I bet you'd be pretty rusty if you ever had to actually use your newly learned skill, wouldn't you?  This is exactly why I feel so passionate about incorporating some time in each and every day for review of previously taught concepts. Once I started doing this in my own classroom, the results were astounding. In this post, I'm going to go over the benefits of daily math review and my favorite ways to actually incorporate it into the classroom. Why Make Time for Reviewing? Daily math review doesn't have to be time-consuming. It can simply take just a few minutes of your day and be incorporated in ways to where you don't even feel like you are spending your instructional time doing it. Here are just a few benefits you will see once you begin. 1. Students will STOP forgetting what you've taught! That's right! No mo...