With so many unknowns about what the upcoming school year has in store, many of us are turning our attention toward upping our teaching skills for distance learning. Here at Teacher2Teacher Help, we recently offered a free webinar to help teachers begin to plan and prerecord virtual (flipped, asynchronous) minilessons. Christy shared many practical tips …
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Simple Ways to Connect with Students in Virtual and Face-to-Face Classrooms
As we turn our attention to the upcoming school year, we do so with many questions and much uncertainty. Will we start the school year face-to-face or remotely? If we are face-to-face, how will social distancing guidelines change the way we teach? The list of questions is endless. And unsolvable. And possibly paralyzing. How do …
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Why Kids Should Read at Least 20 Minutes a Day—POWERFUL!
What if what’s best for kids is also something that is easy to implement? I recently had a conversation with a literacy coach from one of the districts that I support. She shared with me some of the struggles her teachers are having as they launch their distance learning plans. Even though this new normal …
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Free Resources to Support Independent Reading at Home
The research couldn’t be more clear: to grow readers, we need to get them reading…a lot! And to get them reading, they MUST.HAVE.BOOKS! In his seminal book on the effects of free voluntary reading, The Power of Reading, Stephen Krashen says this about access: “It is certainly true that you can lead a horse to …
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Rainbow Editing
In Legos and Editing and One-Minute Editing Check, I shared the idea of giving students a lens through which to edit their writing. Rainbow Editing is another strategy that helps them do that. The physical use of a different color of pencil for each convention gives students a concrete tool for a skill that often seems …
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Daily Dictation Sentences
I used to use Daily Oral Language (D.O.L.) to teach many grammar and usage concepts to my students. I thought I used it pretty effectively, too. Then I started to hear rumblings that maybe this was not the best practice, but I didn’t really know why, so kept doing it but behind closed doors. Even though …
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One-Minute Editing Check
Today’s post gives a strategy for teaching editing, but also helps students develop automaticity using language conventions as I described in the blogpost Tidy-as-You-Go. In the middle of independent writing time, instead of or in addition to doing a mid-workshop teaching point, consider stopping to do a one-minute editing check. The key is that the editing needs …
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Spotlight on Professional Resources: Kids’ Poems
When I was first introduced to the idea of teaching free verse poetry to elementary students, I felt overwhelmed. Teaching form poetry such as haiku, cinquains, rhyming couplets, limericks, etc. felt safe–there was a formula that was easy to follow. But free verse poetry felt wide open and like it had no guiding principles. Then I …
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