Simple yet engaging ways to make your upper elementary lessons meaningful and fun!
π An Earth Day activity that earns the class time
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βββ Earth Day Every Day, Reader. ...unless you're a busy teacher prepping for test season. As much as torn construction paper collages and recycled art projects have their moment, this time of year is not exactly overflowing with extra wiggle room in upper elementary. You need your seasonal activities to pull their weight. Luckily, this one does:
Students move around the room reading Earth Day fact cards, answering text-based questions, working with vocabulary, and responding to what they read. They're up and moving (which is a necessity this time of year), enjoying a seasonal activity, but still putting those info text skills to use. It's easy to set up, flexible to use, and a strong option when you want to fit in Earth Day without turning it into the whole lesson. Click here to cross "Earth Day Activity" off your list πππ: Earth Day Scavenger Hunt. Talk soon, P.S. It's a lot easier to feel good about an Earth Day activity when it still covers nonfiction reading and response skills.
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Creatively Comprehensive
Simple yet engaging ways to make your upper elementary lessons meaningful and fun!
How do you want to spend your time, Reader? You could spend hours making the perfect end-of-year bulletin board. Or...you could not. (because who has time for that in the year 2026?) There is a little-known 3rd option, however: GET THE KIT ON TPT This kit hits the sweet spot: a meaningful student display that already looks pulled together, without you having to build the whole thing from scratch...or at all, tbh. Hand the kids some scissors, and you're good to go. (Did I mention it's a...
Scroll to the PS for an important Mother's Day activity note No offense to the moms out there, Reader. ...but May is packed. It's a little tricky to fit Mother's Day* in between, you know, ::gestures vaguely:: That being said, you know you have at least one sweet friend who will look up at you with those big eyes and ask, "Can we do something for Mom?" And you, with the willpower of a squirrel near an unattended bird feeder, are going to say yes. So why not make it an easy one with this...
Trying to make history interesting, Reader? It can be a tough sell. One quick way to reel them in? Find a story they can see themselves in. And the Battle of Puebla has that built in. You've got: π’ A smaller Mexican army.π’ A much larger French force.π’ Long odds.π’ A victory that surprised everybody. It's the kind of underdog story students connect to. But hereβs the problem: Reading passages about historical events tend to be long. And dry. And hard to understand. So when a teacher told me...