Over the years I’ve read countless blog posts, social media posts, and comments over the debate of balancing cute and content. I think we can all agree that there is value to both, and it’s certainly possible to teach with both style and substance. The purpose of this post is not to criticize one or […]
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Some of my absolute favorite teacher memes are the teacher tired memes. This is probably because I can completely identify with each and every one. Without a doubt, teaching is an exhausting profession. We go hard mentally and physically all day long without breaks or downtime. I work with many new teachers, and one of
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Starting the day with a soft start morning work is a big change for me. For the past several years I’ve had a morning work routine that I loved. I’ve blogged about it a few times, and you can see one of my more thorough blog posts here. My morning work procedures were a well-oiled
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Productive struggle time in math is not natural. Allowing children to struggle with something goes against every instinct I have. When I see a child having difficulty, every pore in my body wants to take over and fix the problem. However, as a mom and as a teacher, I know that is exactly what I
Productive Struggle and It’s Importance Read More »
These first day of school activities will help you start the new year on the right foot! Whether you are a new or veteran teacher, planning for the first day or week of school can be a bit overwhelming. Planning is much easier when you’ve developed your routines, procedures, and you know what to expect
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We all have our favorite teacher supplies. Since I’ve been teaching, I’ve acquired quite the collection of teacher supplies and materials. In fact, when I moved schools last year I realized just how much I had. I am FAR from a hoarder, but it was still shocking to see how many teacher supplies I had
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Changing grade levels is difficult. I still remember crying my eyes out the first time I had to change grade levels. It was devastating! It’s hard to sort through years worth of blog posts, resources, and articles to find just what you need to get started. Since it’s such a challenge, I’ve written this post
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Classroom focus walls are nothing new, and to be quite honest there isn’t a set-up of focus walls that I haven’t tried! I greatly regret not taking pictures from my past focus walls, especially the year I partitioned a classroom wall with painters tape to create grids based on concepts within units. It actually wasn’t
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My teaching partner recently introduced me to my new favorite vocabulary review resources-Quizlet. I know that Quizlet has been around for several years. In fact, I remembered using Quizlet several years ago. According to the site, I made a quiz back in 2010, but I never used the website, because I didn’t see anything more
Student Approved Review Game Read More »
Over the years, formative assessments have become a larger and larger part of my classroom instruction. These are the assessments I use as part of my instructional process, such as written responses, graphic organizers, exit slips, discussions, quick checks, etc. I use these assessments to form math and reading groups and to guide my lesson
Using Student Data Read More »
