The start of the new school year is almost upon us! My classroom exists in a perpetual state of chaos and disorder! While it's hard to leave those lazy mornings and sunny afternoons behind, it is exciting to think about preparing for my new group of students. Once I clear a space in my new (smallish) room and figure out my schedule, these are the go-to assessments that I will pull. Summarizing Narratives    Learning about how our students process and summarize narratives is a good first step. A student's summary yields a wealth of knowledge about how they approach reading ..read more

      This product has been a labor of love. Back in 2010, I wanted to put together a research-based set of activities for classroom teachers working with intermediate level readers. I wanted materials that would focus on academic vocabulary and nonfiction text structure, with lessons that were easy enough to add to an already full schedule and materials that were ready to be copied. Most importantly, I wanted to create something that would be inexpensive for classroom teachers. After months of work, I created this: Reading Intervention for Fluency, Academic Vocabulary, and No ..read more

  This spring I had the wonderful opportunity to take sixth grade classes out for field trips with the Chesapeake Bay Foundation. They brought the canoes and took one class, while I took the other class to do a macroinvertebrate survey. Which meant that I had to really brush up on my macros! Luckily, I've worked with these kinds of lessons in the past, and I've found and made plenty of resources to help me along. Marvelous Macroinvertebrates Because I'm teaching ELA and not science, I needed to make a strong connection to the ELA concepts and standards. Luckily, I was headed into arg ..read more

       It's always tough to know how to start the year with a new group of writers...and this year brings more challenges than most. I'm planning to dust off a tried-and-true instructional technique that yields big benefits to both reading and writing: sentence unscrambling.      Sentence unscrambling is just one of the four basic sentence composing techniques suggested by Don and Jenny Killgallon, authors of multiple texts and exercise books for teachers. When I use the technique in my classroom, I go a step further and use sentence composition activitie ..read more

     Planning for this year is turning out to be especially challenging! Teachers will have students who haven't been in a classroom for over a year, students who have been in socially distant classrooms, and students new to the district....it's quite a range of situations.      I've been thinking about the new challenges that we'll face and what kinds of resources will be best. From the first hour of the first day, my priority is creating a classroom where kids feel safe and valued. But this is easier said than done, and the work that gets us to that dream clas ..read more

  This year has been tough! My school was face-to-face with the entire class for almost the entire year. Last year, I wrote about plans for a classroom library in the face of a pandemic. Now, I'm at the happy point of looking back on the year and thinking about lessons learned. Taking Books from Room to Room    Because I moved about this year, I couldn't have a typical classroom library. Instead, I had to take a bin of books with me from room to room. (By the end of the year, I was carting a tall table and an overhead cart with handouts and books!)      I expected ..read more

 In looking for poems to share with students, I love to go with the work of Emily Dickinson. Here's why! Her life story is intriguing to students Today's students find Emily Dickinson's life fascinating. Her reclusive nature and quiet life are mysterious, and counter to what many students experience. Teaching about Emily Dickinson helps students to consider how an author's life experiences impact their work. Emily Dickinson's poems are great for teaching theme Helping students to identify themes in poems and to write to explain those themes is a big task in sixth grade! Luckily, Emily Dic ..read more

This year will pose so many challenges for classroom teachers! Whether we are teaching remotely or (gulp) face to face, one of the more pleasant challenges will be how to get books in the hands of readers. One of my favorite methods is to talk briefly with a student and then offer three books: one that is very similar to their previously read books; one that is similar, but in a different genre; and one that is a stretch book for the student. Sadly, I can't use this method in the upcoming school year. So I decided to create a Google Form to help me learn about my students!  This form ..read more

The coming school year will be different from any other. As teachers prepare physical and virtual classrooms for the start of the year, many questions loom. One of my favorite rituals for a new school year is preparing my classroom library. I love selecting new books, organizing the space, and thinking about what my new students will like best. But what will this year bring?  A lot of questions, that's what! I've been thinking about these questions for the last few weeks (much to the annoyance of my family, especially on a beach vacation!) While I don't have definitive answers, I hope ..read more

Reading activities for distance learning should be more than just glowing worksheets! In fact, distance learning offers us some fascinating affordances in terms of what kinds of activities we can create for our learners. Read along activitiesHaving students read along with a text can be a great way to build automaticity with new texts. In this reading selection, I have chunked the text so that students can pause to read along.  This kind of shared reading would also work well for distance tutoring sessions. A printable version of this reading selection can be found here. Adding video ..read more