April is one of my favorite months of the school year because of Poetry Month.  It's fun to write, fun to read, and the students enjoy all of it!  Below you will find a list of activities that are perfect for celebrating Poetry Month. 1.  Poetry Flip Book With students, study the different types of poetry and create a poetry flip book that students can use as a reference throughout the month. Find the poetry flip book HERE . 2.  30 Poems in 30 Days Using construction paper or cardstock for a cover, have students create a poetry book in which they spend the entire month of April writing and illustrating poems.  We obviously aren't in school all 30 days, so you could double up some days or even assign for weekend homework.   3.  Poetry in Pairs After studying types of poetry, pair students up to write a collaborative poem.  They could collaborate in writing the poem from beginning to end, or one students writes a l......

I DO love back to school time. I love the freshly sharpened crayons, the clean pink erasers, and I especially love the pencils that are all the same size and perfectly pointed for the first (and possibly the last) time in my classroom. Back to School is a time of new beginnings, the glorious Spring of the school year. It's also the perfect time to read some great books to teach concepts like classroom rules and procedures, but more than that, to teach our newbies the deeper things that we want in a class community, like respect, caring, and tolerance.  So which books do I enjoy? I actually could have written a post with about 50 of them but I narrowed it down to my current top ten: 1. How I Spent My Summer Vacation Having kids write about what they did during the summer is a classic. In fact, it's been done so long, I think they might even have done this in ancient Egypt. What I like about this book though, is instead of telling the usual "What I Did Ov......