Teacherof20

Hello there! Merry Christmas! Happy Hanukah! Happy Kwanzaa! Can you believe it is the end of the semester already? Fall semester seems to always fly by! We’ve worked so hard to build routines and procedures, and finally have started getting into some great content with our kiddos when…boom! The holidays are here! By this time of the year, everyone is ready for a little break. Here is a great little gem I made with my kids last year. This is where they took home all their goodies from our party: I also had them do some hand print art: It did not take long. I had the tempra paint set up in the morning. When they came in, as they were unpacking and doing their morning work, I called them to my kidney table and had them do their handprint. The next day when it dried, we drew our snowmen and glued a snowman poem to the sheet. I laminated them as placemats for them to take home in their goodie bag (seen above). Here is an easy template for the reindeer bag if you’d li...

My school is involved in the Creative Learning Initiative this year. Our got training at the beginning of the year, and CLI coaches come to our campus and co teach with teachers to help them implement the strategies we've learned. My big take away from the first session in August is that drama based instruction (which is what our trainers refer to it) is a lot like cooperative learning strategies. A strategy I tried this semester was the character x ray, where after reading a story you give students an outline of a body. They are supposed to write events of the story on the outside, and feelings the character might have felt because of those events on the inside. It was a very challenging activity because the characters don't always say how events in the story made them feel. We went to a follow up training a few weeks ago. Here are some strategies I took away: 1. People to people: students walk around the room. When the teacher says "people to people" students fin...

While most of the country is Common Core aligned,  Texas bases its standards on the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills, otherwise known as the TEKS. Our standardized test is called the STARR. In it, a vast majority of the questions require 3rd, 4th, and 5th graders to use their background knowledge in combination with what the author has told them to make pedictions, or inferences, about the text. The problem is, how do STARR test writers know what background knowledge children have? How do you write inferencing questions that ensure the background knowledge required to answer them is  the background knowledge that most 3rd through 5th graders have? As a reading specialist,  I provide support in a 3rd and 4th grade classroom this year. I have been on the look out for ways to make teaching inferencing easy. So many teachers have told me  it's a hard skill to apply, and that it may not be developmentally appropriate. Unfortunately, we still have to teach it. Here a...

I just finished my October Word Work packet and it's on sale on my Teacher's Notebook shop. Enter to win it by visiting my shop and clicking on "promotions." It has printables as well as interactive games that teach vocabulary related to the month of October. It is 65 pages long, and has enough activities to last through the whole month of October in your word work center! See it here. Also check out my October word work freebie here. It has select activities from the pack mentioned above. Watch for more word work packs to be posted soon! December is already posted and November is coming soon!

One Teacher's Adventures is doing a giveaway! Visit her blog to find out more!

I am today's featured seller in Ainse's blog! Check it out here. August is coming up. I hope you all are enjoying your last days of summer. Be sure to read my post about the five things to do before beginning the school year. It will help you get off to a good start. Also, check out my store. I just put my store banner up, and have added some new things to old products.

Hope is doing a back to school giveaway. Teacherof20 is one of the sellers featured in this giveaway. Check it out here!

I recently joined Teacher's Notebook. If you follow my store, you can get my voracious vowel pair ee/ea edition for free! Here is the link to my store!

Happy August everyone!  In preparing for the new school year, please remember these simple things to help your school year get off to a great start: 1. Make a to do list and list items by importance. Scratch things off your list when finished. 2. A place for everything and everything in its place. As much as possible try to assign things a spot. My classroom even has a "lost pieces bucket. " This is a bucket where students would put game pieces to games that were already put away/not out at the time. At the end of the year,  I'll go through my lost pieces bucket and store things away where they go. 3. Less is more: if you haven't used that set of ABC cards your retired teacher friend gave you two years ago, toss them.  We teach in the TpT age. There are so many great resources right at our fingertips... and we can store them digitally! There is no need to lug around things you're not using. 4. Invest in a record keeping book of some sort.  There are great ones...

A new school year begins! As a celebration of my new job as a reading specialist, everything in my store is on sale for the next 48 hours! I've got two new products I'm very excited about. They are the voracious vowel pairs packs here and here. I've got two editions and more to come. I'm waiting on your feedback to make the future vowel pair packs better. A couple of the packs are freebies. You can download them here and here. Happy teaching!