Teacherof20

This week's talented teacherpreneur is Angela from the Fantastic Teacher ! Angela is currently a teacher in McKinny, Texas. She decided to become a teacherpreneur when she was working at a poor school, and started making resources for her class. While working in Dallas ISD, her district implemented Writer's Workshop. As it was being implemented, she had a wonderful writing coach mentor who trained her and inspired her to create daily lesson plans for her class. As a result, she created hermost valuable resource, her Writer's Workshop (Taller de Escritura ). Her advice to those thinking of selling their resources online? If you love to create activities and lessons for your class, TpT is a good place to share your ideas and make money at the same time! It takes time to grow, but if it is something you love to do, it is worth it! Her goal moving forward is to find or create a daily intervention for her students that is fun and engaging!

Subitizing is the rapid and accurate identification of numbers used to assess small quantities. Knowing how to subitize (or recognize small quantities without having to count them) enables students to gain automaticity and numerical fluency. They can add and subtract faster. They are more confident in their abilities. In my subitizing activities center , I also incorporated number words, as an added skill students can practice and a way to incorporate literacy into my math time (we will fit literacy in whenever we can!) So, why is it important to have a math center focusing on number recognition, quantity (subitizing), and number words? Students need to be fluent in reading and math. Number words come up on many occasions in text (one specific example is the DRA assessment). Numerical fluency is important in problem solving. Seeing representations in your mind of the quantity of a number can help with adding more on, or taking away, or even grouping (tasks that require mu...

My name is Nicole, and I am a past K/1st teacher and Reading Specialist. Currently I am a stay at home mom, and TpT seller at the Teacherof20 shop. In the past I've written 3 successful Donor choose projects that have gotten funded by anonymous donors within months of being written. Here are a few tips on how to write a stellar project. 1. Stay within the $100 to $300 range. The donors choose website itself will tell you that projects that are overly expensive rarely get funded. Not all projects are fully funded by a single donor. In the event yours isn't, it will take longer to fund if you have to wait for multiple donors. 2. Pick items and a theme for your project that isn't an immediate necessity. If you need the items right away, you probably don't want to rely on Donors Choose because it will more than likely take months for someone to fund your project. The three times my projects got funded, it took at least 2 or 3 months. If you absolutely need the materials r...

You probably don’t know this about me, but I wasn’t always the picture of teacher organization that I am today ;-). I used to do all the things they say not to. I had piles of paper everywhere (gasp!) I planned my lessons at midnight on Sunday night before teaching for the week. I realized 30 seconds before students were due to walk in that I didn’t have any copies run for the lesson they were about to start. I scrambled to get technology set up after students were already seated and ready to go, resulting i downtime and chaos. Basically, I spent tons of time and increased my stress all because I didn’t have a plan. It was frustrating, discouraging, and to add insult to injury, I didn’t even really enjoy what I was teaching. If you’ve ever felt like this, lesson planning and prepping ahead of time is a total game-changer. Once I started lesson planning earlier, my professional educator journey got a whole lot easier. Here are some of the lessons and how they've radi...

I felt so honored/nervous/all the feelings you feel when you’ve gotten your dream job, but now the anticipation of what’s to come is looming over your shoulder. It was exactly the same way I felt when I first graduated from college, and got my first teaching job. There are so many feelings all bundled up: fear, joy, pride, nervous, etc. I was finally a reading specialist! Sure, in the past I had provided intervention to my grade level team, I had completed my masters, I had tested and gotten my Reading Specialist certification on my teaching certificate. However, I had never actually held the title of reading specialist until now. I couldn’t believe people actually got paid to meet with reading groups all day! That was by far my favorite thing to do during my teaching day. Then the nerves and apprehension set in. How well would I know my students if I wasn’t spending all day with them? How do I provide intervention to 4 th graders if I’ve only taught kinder and 1 st in m...

How do you implement Words Their Way into a classroom? It is very simple. The first step is to give students the initial assessment: it is basically a spelling test. After you have given the spelling test, you use the score sheet to score student’s answers. The score sheet looks like this: The column that your students miss the most (the ones I’ve circled) is the one where you being instruction. The column they fall under will determine what WTW book you will use. The books are: Letter Name-Alphabetic, Within Word Pattern, Syllables and Affixes, and Derrivational Relations. I have broken down the classroom instruction so that each day we are doing an activity with our Words Their Way sorts. Here is what my groups look like in the second grade classroom I’m mentoring. I’ve changed the names of the students for confidentiality purposes: Short vowels: John, Sam, Jane, Sally, Audrey Digraphs and Blends: Arron, Greg, Katie Long vowels: Mary, Marlene, Josh, Nicole, Christi...

I've heard it said that cooperative learning strategies are hard to implement in the general education classroom. I believe that not only can it be done, but that it’s impossible to teach without these! Here     is a link on the research that supports these in the classroom. The research Marzano has done has greatly impacted my teaching philosophy. As he notes, it is important when utilizing these strategies to be systematic in their use. It is important to embed individual and group accountability, as well as ensuring the interaction and interdependence within students is positive.  I think teachers may shy away from these strategies because we can feel out of our comfort zone at times. Most of the teachers today were traditional students of yesterday. We sat in rows facing the teacher, and didn't have many opportunities to share our learnings with our peers. Even as teachers, the professional development we attend rarely implement the strategies they so adamantly ...