Whether your students are reading a novel, learning a math concept, or being introduced to new content in Social Studies and Science, critical thinking activites play an intricate role to help students learn on a deeper level.  Being able to think outside the box or at a deeper level, helps students not only retain the information, but they develop an appreciation for the lesson.   This post will provide you with ideas for provoking critical thinking to use across the curriculum and FREE charts to use with your students. 1.  Think Pair Share TPS is a strategy in which students work collaboratively to answer a question or solve a problem.   This strategy helps focus attention and engage students in comprehending the material.  The model is desgined for teachers to: a.  Think-  Ask students a specific question about the topic or a theme in story.  Tell them to "think individually" about what they know or have learned about this topic or theme.   b.  Pair-   Pa...
             Teaching paragraph writing can be challenging. Not only are there multiple components and a specific structure to follow, but there are also factors involved like word choice, content, and writing style. Even though it's not easy, teaching writing is one of my favorite subjects! In this post, I'd like to share with you some tips that I've found to help make student paragraph writing more successful. 1. Use Mentor Paragraphs One of the first things I do when I teach paragraph writing is to share lots of paragraph examples with my students. The paragraphs I show the kids are ones I have saved from year's past or ones that I make myself. I make sure to take off student names and I like to type these so they're easy to read. We look at the paragraph examples (both good and bad) and see how they're organized, if they stay on topic, use some transitions, and have a good flow. We also look at the topic sentences and the conclusion sentences in partic...
In this post I will go over some activities that we completed in my classroom in order to cover the third grade standard 3.G.1. I hope you will be able to take some of these ideas and complete them with your own students. :) Before analyzing shape attributes, I made sure my students understood some basic geometry information. We went over shape names, how to count the number of sides (easily done by counting the vertices), and basic vocabulary words (line, line segment, point, ray). If your students need practice on basic geometry vocabulary, click here to download a free printable pack .  During small groups, I had my students choose two random shapes from their baggie.  They then compared and contrasted the attributes on a dry erase dot . It helps to have an anchor chart with key geometry terms you want the students to use.  This activity was a total hit. I gave my students a riddle, and they wrote down the clues on their dots. They then used t...
Teaching acceptance in today's classroom is now more important than ever. As tensions run high across the world with various ethnic, religious and political groups, teachers are faced with dealing with a mainstream media and social media presence like never before. It is easy for students to get a hold of videos, text, or images that display hatred towards others. Parents play a crucial role in helping their children understand acceptance, but it still falls in teachers' laps on a daily basis. How do teachers go about teaching acceptance in a world of hate and fear? We will attempt to offer some tips and guidance as you try to instill kindness, empathy, and compassion into your students. Accepting of Differences Prejudice and discrimination are learned behaviors. People are not born with these behaviors. That is why it is our job as educators to teach acceptance of everyone. The home plays a significant role in a child's beliefs about others that are different ...
So you've taught something new. Whether it was to your whole class or to a small group, whether it was the introduction of a new reading strategy, a step in the process of writing an organized paragraph, or how to differentiate between two tricky spelling patterns, you did it. You've done the modeling, you've guided them through some examples, and now you want to give your students a task with which to practice what you taught them. You could give all your students the exact same task and send them back to their seat while you sit at your desk and bask in the glory of your engaging lesson. You could. But what might work better, what might allow the task to benefit each and every student and the various levels of understanding they have at this moment, is to differentiate the task. Yeah right, you scoff. In a dream world. Who has time to do that? At least, who has time to do that consistently? Differentiating a task can sometimes take quite a bit of though...
Planning can be a daunting task - especially writing. There's so much that goes into it: grammar, sentence structure, the writing process, mentor texts, and more! On top of all that, you have to also come up with ideas to make each part interesting for students. It took me many years to master planning writing, and I'm still learning new things every year! Start with students' interests Before you even begin planning, think about a few subjects that your students are interested in. I often Google the topics to see if there are student-friendly articles or websites that would go along with my lesson, and then pick one topic based off of what I find. Here are some topics I've used in the past: Opinion writing: bullying, Sea World whales, school lunch Explanatory writing: Science experiments, Ancient Rome, the Holocaust (we were reading Number the Stars by Lois Lowry and they were obsessed) Creative narrative: a story about space Personal narrative: &...