Started by the now retired from blogging, Reflective Teacher, and taken up by Kevin Hodgson I am a guest host this week for the first Day in a Sentence of 2008. Here are the simple rules: Boil down your week, your day, or even your year into a single sentence Use the comment feature here …
Category: Writing
Daily Journal Idea
Submitted by Guy Swentek… Students write every day in a single-subject spiral notebook that they will take home every night for review and return every day. Some “typical” writings/lessons for the week: Monday – spelling words/sentences Tuesday – phonics & fluency Wednesday – word knowledge Thursday – vocabulary & context meaning Friday – writing lesson …
Student Audio Book Reviews
This from fellow Apple Distinguished Educator, Matthew Callison, an excellent tool for engaging students in reading. Mr. Callison works with a third grade population of English Language Learners. He has students record audio reviews of books they are reading and uploads them to this blog, BookLook.org. There are just a handful of reviews so far …
See Students As Individuals Not As Diagnoses
This post is a wish for a perfect world but if you agree with me, you can do something about it fairly easily. I am really trying to make a conscious effort to adjust my own thinking and the way I talk about students. I think we need to be careful not to refer to …
Heritage Poetry Writing Idea
submitted by Francie Kugelman This is a popular poem template which I found http://www.swva.net/fred1st/wif.htm”>online: The WHERE I’M FROM Template I am from _______ (specific ordinary item), from _______ (product name) and _______. I am from the _______ (home description… adjective, adjective, sensory detail). I am from the _______ (plant, flower, natural item), the _______ (plant, …
Comic Life and Open Court: Simple Technology, Higher Level Thinking, 21st Century Skills
see Comic Life examples used with Open Court Reading see general curricular uses of Comic Life At the second session of Closing the Digital Divide, Integrating Technology in the Open Court Curriculum which I taught at the Los Angeles County Office of Education, we continued our work with Digital Video and Clay Animation. …
Writing About Dreams
Here’s a fun activity for teaching creative writing at any grade level. It aligns particularly well with folktale units (folktales, sharing stories, storytelling) but can be adapted to other units as well. Special thanks to Susan Obuchi for submitting this idea. I have students draw a picture of themselves sleeping with their head on a …
Teach Units, Not Stories
I’ve been noticing that a lot of teachers get bogged down by individual stories in the Open Court units and miss the big ideas of the units. While you do need to teach the stories in the anthology and will need to scaffold vocabulary just enough to give access to English Language Learners, the individual …
Writer’s Workshop
I’m hearing some online grumbling about Writer’s Workshop lately, specifically how you come up with mini-lessons. The good news…you don’t have to have a book to give you mini-lessons (although I can recommend a few) On the first day you model for students how you write but after that, your mini-lessons come from assessing your …
American Heroes Biography Project
This idea was submitted by Mary Hahn, who retired last month after forty-one years in the teaching profession. Many of my best ideas in the past three years have come from her classroom and we’re not even at the same school. Thank you, Mary! This project has worked very successfully in my classroom to get …