You are a great teacher (that's why you're checking out products related to building relationships) and you know how important it is to spend time getting to know WHO your students are before you jump head first into content.
This post will give you some ideas you can use to start building relationships the very first week. Click to read more and start planning!
Read MoreAfter years and years of holding seminars in my middle school ELA classroom, I have come up 6 tips you can implement to help you and your students get the most out of a seminar session! I believe these tips help my seminars run effectively in ALL of my classes (yes, even that class that can’t handle hardly anything) Click to see if there are any tips you can add to what you’re already doing!
Read MoreUp until this point, a lot of our students have just focused on plot, characters, POV, setting, etc. as independent concepts. This is how I got my students to go beyond thinking about story elements in isolation, and to start looking at how they work together and interact.
Read MoreWow. Some days are just a struggle in the middle school ELA classroom. Trying to get 12-14 year olds to focus on reading for an extended amount of time takes some work and energy. After watching my students float off into la la land after 15 minutes of reading, I knew I had to come up with a way to keep them engaged during extended readings…
Read MoreI love to think about my beginning teaching days when I did not have systems set into place. How students would be absent, and I wouldn’t even realize it. Then they would come back the next day and bombard me with ‘what did I miss? What did I miss?’ questions. And then there was never any consistent follow through on my part to make sure the assignments were turned in.
Finally, I created some forms to help establish some systems and procedures…
Read MoreIt look me years to find the perfect notebook set up for my ELA class. I went through sections, interactive, and unstructured styles, but could not find anything that worked for me until this…
Read MoreNo one in my class had any idea that the quiet boy who sat at table one had it going on. That his responses to our novel were insightful and went beyond the basics. It probably would have stayed this way and he never would have become a contracted response expert if I didn’t do this one thing….
Read MoreI know you have that one class that pushes all of your buttons. For me, it's my first period. It is a group of 15 students who failed language arts last year. All together. In one class. To top it all off, it's almost all boys. Apathy and attitudes run deep and wide. After about a week of frustration, I knew that traditional teaching was not going to work. Even if I'm upbeat, excited, and throwing all of my best stuff at them. It was like putting on a show to an empty theater. So now in this class we do a little bit of language arts, and a whole lot of mindset work.
It's a little something I call Life Class.
