I'm Jodi from The Clutter-Free Classroom. Fun fact about me: I changed grade levels annually for the first nine years of my teaching career.   The actual series went like this 2nd ➡️ 3rd ➡️ 2nd ➡️ 4th ➡️ 1st ➡️ 2nd ➡️ Kindergarten (I still wake in a cold sweat with flashbacks to that experience) ➡️ 2nd and ➡️ back to 3rd.  All but one of those involved packing up and moving classrooms, two involved moving districts and one had me moving up the East Coast.  Needless to say, I was quite happy to finally settle in third grade and grow some roots. My experience has made me very away of the challenges that come with a grade level change. This is particularly the case when moving between a primary and an intermediate grade. You come to appreciate the challenges and the benefits of each. Perhaps you requested the move, or maybe it was an involuntary transfer.  Either way, you get to experience something new and change can be exciting!  Below are five tips to help mak...
My first year of teaching feels like it was eons ago! Looking back now it is all a blur.  All I can remember is this overwhelming feeling of terror, confusion, and eagerness all rolled into one. Despite my feelings, my first year of teaching was a roller coaster ride of ups and downs that I will never forget.  There are so many lessons I learned during my first year of teaching that helped shape the teacher I eventually became. With this in mind, I thought I would share my top 5 lessons learned during that first year with all of the "soon to be" teachers out there.  Here it goes... 1. Don't Compare Yourself to Others!  This is something that we all do. However, as a first-year teacher, this can be tragic!  You are brand new and have a lot to learn.  Comparing yourself to a teacher that has been around and has his or her classroom running like a well-oiled machine is only going to have a negative impact on you as a professional. This is especially true with Social M...
Containing student excitement (and, truthfully, my own) during the last few days of the school year can be difficult. We (the students and teachers) have worked hard all year, and now with summer vacation on the horizon, staying focused is a challenge. My battery is truthfully on low this time of year, and student excitement is understandably at an all time high. Even with the pressure to continue instruction, I know my students deserve a little fun at the end of the year with activities that will provide cherished memories of this school year.  Here are a few easy prep suggestions for some fun activities to make your end of the school year one to remember. 1. Hold an old fashioned classroom spelling bee. Why not take a day to review spelling words from the year by holding a fun classroom spelling bee. In many classrooms spelling bees may seem a little old-fashioned, but your students will have fun participating in one. Give prizes or brag tags to winners. Try a fun twist...
Cursive?  What's cursive?  How many of you still teach it or have students that come to you knowing how to write in cursive?  Learning how to write ones name is one of the first things that children learn.  They need to know how to write their own name with paper pencil.  Right?  Well, we haven't changed it.  With technology being so readily available, once students learn how to write in print, cursive has been place on the back burner.  The Common Core Standards took it out completely.  So, you may be wondering why is it necessary to teach cursive in the digital age.  I have five reason that may persuade you to keep it in the curriculum.   1.  Signatures Needing to write your signature is just as important today as it was 200 years ago.  Signatures are needed on legal documents.  When you are told to sign your name, do you sign your name in print or cursive?  If you have your own signature, it's your own style, and much harder to duplicate.  Without knowing the ba...
If there is one thing that will help you be a more effective teacher, it is making connections with your students. Below we have outlined our top 10 ways that we can connect with our class. They are easy to implement and will result in your students performing better for you in all subject areas. 1. Listen! Probably the most important thing you can do every day is just listen to your students. They have so much to share and just taking a few seconds to listen to their stories will make all the difference. With the hustle and bustle that we all face on a daily basis, this can seem like it is hard to accomplish. But we must, as educators, connect with our students. Listening is the first step in establishing a trusting relationship with your class. 2. Greet Every Day When the students arrive in the hallways in the morning it is important to be visual outside your classroom door. You set the tone for your class every day. By smiling and greeting each child by name, you are re...
Of all the stages of the writing process, doesn't it feel like revising often gets the short end of the stick? One of the obstacles that always seems to be in the way is the simple logistics of where to do it. Students write their rough drafts in their composition notebooks, filling the lines, front and back, eventually "finishing," and we move them into the revising stage. Okay, make it better, we say. And students caret in a few adjectives. Maybe they even cross out a sentence or arrow one into a better place. They notice a capital letter to fix and a word they repeated accidentally, and ultimately, the revising stage begins to look very similar to the editing stage: a little fix here and a little fix there. The piece as a whole looks basically the same as it did prior to revising. And that's a bummer because the potential of that piece is a lot higher than where it stands, and the revising stage is meant to be a time to close that gap. But where ...
Happy Teacher Appreciation Week! To celebrate the amazing job that teachers do every day, we're giving away $375 in Teachers Pay Teachers gift certificates! Fifteen lucky winners will each win a $25 TPT gift certificate! Clip art by My Clip Art Store . How to enter Visit and follow each one of our stores via the Rafflecopter below to earn all 18 entries and see some great upper grade teaching resources! Enter by midnight on Thursday, May 11th, 2017. Bonus Entries Get 1 bonus entry for commenting on the Facebook post! Use the "Leave us a Comment" option at the end of the Rafflecopter.  Share, share, share! Share the giveaway with your teacher friends! You can send them the link to this blog post or tag them on the post on our  F acebook page. a Rafflecopter giveaway ...
Teachers have been using reading logs as reading homework for a very log time now.  I was told as a first-year teacher that I had to use them, and I believed they were the best way to track a students' reading.  It took me a few years of teaching AND becoming a parent of a school-aged child to realize that reading logs didn't provide the value I believed they did.  Here is some info about why reading logs don't work and what we can do instead. Reading Logs: The Teacher's Perspective Does this sound familiar? You give a student a reading log on Monday. Each night they have to read for "whatever" minutes and write their start and end time on their log, as well as some other information about the text they read. In addition, parents have to sign it.  The next morning you walk around and check to make sure reading logs are filled in and signed. If they aren't signed or filled in, it is assumed the student didn't read.   So, if a reading log is si...