I remember a moment in my 5th-grade classroom. I was teaching my students about informational writing. We were going through a lesson about adding voice and style to their work, when all of a sudden I realized, forget adding style, my students couldn't put together a strong paragraph. I was so caught up in helping them improve the quality of their writing that I did not ensure they had a strong foundation in writing a well-organized paragraph. For the next few weeks, I threw away all of my original lesson plans and focused on the basics: Paragraph Structure. Be sure to grab the FREEBIE at the end! Here are the steps I took to teach paragraph writing. 1. Make Paragraph Writing Concrete Just like we use manipulatives in math, writing needs to be concrete too. When I first introduce paragraph writing, I begin with a burger. Yes, a burger! We have a whole class discussion about what makes a fantastic burger and the purpose of each component. Once we all agr...
Opinion writing can be very challenging for students, especially when they have little experience with this genre of writing. I often find that my students have a difficult time with one, or ALL of the following: Stating their opinions. Generating strong reasons to support their opinions. Using details and examples to support their reasons. This year when I introduced opinion writing, I decided to take more of a collaborative approach, in which ALL students were able to contribute ideas, and then draw on ideas from each other. When we started our unit, we simply started with forming opinions. I gave students multiple topics to think about, and asked them to use post-its to write ANY opinion that they had on each topic. Students wrote and posted their opinions around the classroom, and at the same time they were able to read the opinions of their classmates. These opinions led to some GREAT discussions, and gave students a starting point for “stating their op...
If you teach intermediate grades, you know that a solid understanding of our place value system is essential. That being said, many math series focus a great deal on "fill in the blank" place value work...reading and writing big numbers, writing numbers in expanded form, or putting greater than or less than signs between two or more numbers. Don't get me wrong--these are important. Unfortunately, students can be successful at these tasks with very minimal understanding of our place value system. Want to kick it up a notch? Check out these five ideas and see what you think! Study the names of the different "periods" of numbers. Students LOVE to learn about big numbers...and even if your curriculum only goes up to 6 digits like mine, exposing students to the patterns of our place value system helps build understanding and interest. Reading books like Steven Kellogg's "How Much is a Million" and other big number books can add to the...
Hello! It's Deb Hanson from Crafting Connections today! Today I'm going to share three helpful test-taking strategy that you can teach your students for when they encounter synonym and/or antonym questions on standardized tests! What is your reaction when you see an ELA test question like this? As an ELL specialist who worked with 3rd-5th grade ELLs for more than ten years, I can tell you that viewing such a question causes me to break out in a sweat! While my ELLs know the difference between a synonym and antonym, they so often don't get to prove their knowledge because of the advanced vocabulary words, like tenacious, present in multiple-choice questions. After encountering several standardized test questions like this one, I began to teach my ELLs a few test-taking strategies in hopes that I would be giving them the tools that would allow them to be as successful as possible. In my opinion, these strategies are beneficial for all students, not...
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