Eventually the time will come when we ask our students to self-reflect and/or assess their writing. Sometimes in the form of a rubric - sometimes in the form of a checklist - two stars and a wish, whatever you want... Continue Reading →
Born out of lack of success in having students independently use their class word wall, high frequency word lists, or personal spelling dictionaries to edit their writing my co-teacher @YYteach and I decided to give the Don't and Do spelling strategy... Continue Reading →
One of the key components of any writing mini-lesson is modelling what we expect of our students. Often this takes the form of "guided" writing. However, over the years I have found that this wasn't always as effective as it... Continue Reading →
My conundrum is that in the classroom I use my computer to take anecdotal notes, look at student data on the fly, etc (especially during conferring for reading/writing). Oftentimes however my computer is connected to the projector cable and so... Continue Reading →
This year in conjunction with our TCRWP Poetry Unit we launched "World Poetry Cafe." The idea behind it is simple. Solicit other members of the school/broader community to come and share a poem they love. It can be from their... Continue Reading →
No internet? No problem! Just make sure that you enable Google G Suite's offline access feature and you are good to go. Once connectivity resumes all your docs will be synced to the cloud and in the interim you can... Continue Reading →
Note: the original post was published in October 2018. Now in June 2019 we have version 4.0 with lessons learned and some refinements. The revisions are added in italics and am proud to say that we have complete task cards... Continue Reading →
My awesome co-teacher @YYteach and I recently used this "Simon Says" Vocabulary mastery strategy at the end of our math unit to consolidate our vocabulary understanding. It works something like this ... Using Kagan's Pair Compare cooperative learning framework, students... Continue Reading →
In the past I struggled to effectively involve my whole class authentically in retelling, inferring, and identifying author's message because the ranges of reading levels and English proficiency were so vast that it was hard to find a text we... Continue Reading →
