Vocabulary Building Strategies So many vocabulary building strategies fall short of the goal–creating readers, writers, and thinkers who can understand and communicate through powerful language. There are reliable (and simple!) alternatives to the easy and fruitless common practices. Photo by Zen Chung on Pexels.com Vocabulary Instruction Improves Comprehension When It Focuses On… ….which of the…
High School ELA Classroom Setup We’ve all “crashed out” during high school ELA classroom setup at the start of the year. Instead, let’s do what’s worth our precious time. Photo by Miguel Á. Padriñán on Pexels.com What is classroom setup? Classroom setup essentials include the physical space as well as key materials that you’ll use…
Daily Routine Slides Who creates the most content? Not the daily news. Not a Tik Tok influencer. It’s teachers. We create daily routine slides, assignments, lectures, activities, curriculum, data spreadsheets, and family newsletters. The school year is a treadmill of content creation, and you can’t adjust the speed. Photo by Andrea Piacquadio on Pexels.com You…
Questions for Book Club I have struggled to succeed with book clubs (or literature circles) throughout my teaching. This year I was able to break through with powerful questions for book club that both enriched my practice and sustained my students. Powerful Questions for Book Clubs in High School What if I set up book…
Keep your classroom library current with these amazing September 2023 YA new releases. Secrets Never Die by Vincent Ralph An exciting thriller where a former child star’s secrets come to life. Male POV. I can see pairing it with books like We Were Liars by e. lockhart or I Know What You Did Last Summer.…
Professional Reading for Teachers These titles are not new, but it takes me awhile to get through my professional TBR pile as I prefer to go slow and focus on fewer titles. Do you! Literacy as Liberation, Visible Learning for Literacy, and Cultivating Genius Literacy is Liberation by Dr. Kimberly Parker First, I am so…
I always set goals for myself to read more actual research, but I rarely follow through. In this post, I’ll share some research from 2020 and later on independent reading that I actually read. Yay! What comes first–print exposure or reading skills? van Bergen, E., Vasalampi, K., & Torppa, M. (2021). How Are Practice and…
Reading Independently There are lots of positive thoughts students have about reading independently, but this post is about the negative ones, why they’re valid, and how we as teachers can respond. You can see an Instagram live version of this post here. What Students Think About Reading Independently Here are some of the most common…
Have you seen those Instagram vs. reality videos and memes? Photos by Geraldine West This is like that for how educelebs say independent reading should look versus how it actually looks. I am having a little fun with this post, but I really do appreciate an aspirational lens and am inspired by people who capture…
Not sure if you’ve seen the readers’ bill of rights from Daniel Pennac which is often used in schools, but I am riffing on that idea as rights for teachers, because you too, Gentle Reading Teacher, have rights. Here they are. You can add, revise, and delete, as you see fit. You know best. There…
