An End of Year Memory Book is such a special keepsake for students to look back on and remember their school year. They are a great way for students to get creative while reflecting on their personal and academic growth and experiences. Below are 3 Memory Book formats that will fit your needs depending on what type you want to use with your ...
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Making a Plan for Your Poetry Unit (Grades 3-5)
Starting to plan poetry month? a poetry unit? or prepping ways to sprinkle poetry in throughout the school year? It can be so time consuming to find quality resources for poetry instruction! These low prep resources below cover everything you will need to plan your poetry unit. They include everything from visuals to display and ...
Teaching Creating Sensory Images and Visualizing Reading Strategies
Explicitly teaching and practicing reading strategies is so important to give students tools to better comprehend what they are reading. Some of these powerful strategies include using background knowledge, making predictions, asking questions, making inferences, making connections, visualizing and creating sensory images. WHY SHOULD I ...
Teaching Informational Writing in 1st Grade, 2nd Grade, and 3rd Grade
Informational writing can be a very new type of writing for many elementary students in 1st, 2nd, and 3rd grade. Primary students are usually used to writing in their daily journal or creating fictional stories. However, informational writing requires a totally different set of writing skills. With narrative writing, students can just write ...
Teaching Narrative Writing in 1st, 2nd, and 3rd Grade
When teaching narrative writing in 1st, 2nd, and 3rd grade, there are so many writing skills to cover. They range from creating a sequence of events (beginning, middle, and end) to more difficult skills like building strong characterization. With a class full of students at such varying levels of writing, it can be overwhelming to think of where ...
Teaching the Steps of the Writing Process to Elementary Students
As adult writers, we have a clear idea of how we each personally attack a piece of writing. For me, I know that I tend to spend a lot of time collecting information, using sticky notes on texts, and taking notes in a notebook (prewriting). Then, I take a short amount of time mostly drafting just from my brain. After I have the bare bones and ...
TEACHING STUDENTS TO FIND THE MAIN IDEA IN NONFICTION TEXTS
WHY TEACH STUDENTS TO FIND THE MAIN IDEA? Being able to find the main idea of a text is a complex and important nonfiction reading skill for upper elementary students (3rd-5th grade). “Learning how to understand what a section of a text or whole text is mostly about is critical to comprehension” (Serravello 2015). Teaching students to find ...
Using Genre Crafts to Teach Genres to Elementary Students
Exposing students to a wide variety of genres is so important to creating lifelong readers. It helps students begin to identify who they are as readers, including their likes and dislikes. By building genre background knowledge they are able to make connections, and ultimately comprehend, a new book of the same genre. WHAT ARE GENRE ...
Back to School: 5 Tips & Activities to Get Your Classroom Ready for Reading
From the moment students enter the classroom, they should feel excited to dig into books and reading instruction. There are ways we make our classroom visually inviting to new readers, as well as back to school reading activities we can have prepared. Beyond giving reading assessments, it is important for students to self-reflect and express ...
5 PRINTABLE AND DIGITAL END OF YEAR ACTIVITIES FOR ELEMENTARY STUDENTS
The end of the year brings testing, finishing up grades, field days, assemblies, and more! Between all of this (plus exhaustion!) it can get hard to continually create engaging lesson plans. Having low-prep, meaningful end of year activities for elementary students to work on independently is SO key! Whether you are distance learning, hybrid ...
