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!
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...
Not everything needs to be invented from scratch, Reader. So if you need to come up with a way for students to respond to reading that doesn't interfere with your plans to binge The Pitt this week (because how is it the season finale already), may I humbly suggest this done-for-you option: JUST HIT PRINT They work with independent reading, centers, homework, small groups, and pair beautifully with whatever reading curriculum you are already using. So instead of spending your evening coming up...
We're trying something new, Reader: Every Friday until the end of the school year, Iβm sending a short note built around one real teacher question. Not the kind you're asking your admin. The real kind. The questions that show up in the teacher's lounge, next to the copier that seamlessly ran off 27 of 28 copies before breaking down. So letβs start here: Is it too late to start something new in April? For a brand-new system with twelve moving parts and a learning curve? Yes. For something...