Category: Lesson Ideas
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Movement For the Win
My class this year is extra wiggly, loud and silly. All three of those things have contributed to making this year my hardest year of teaching yet. It has made me question myself as an educator, and I have often wondered if I am doing the best for these 25 humans. What I have come…
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Pocket Notebooks > Gradebooks
Traditional gradebooks suck. There, I said it. I struggle being able to gain insight about where my students are at from simply looking at a gradebook. Over the past few years I have found the perfect solution. POCKET NOTEBOOKS! If you use entry or exit tickets for formative data then you may love them too.…
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Classroom Bulletin Board HACK
If you’ve been using bulletin board paper and you hate how quickly it fades, or that it always seems to rip, then I have the perfect classroom hack for you! Drumroll please… FLAT SHEETS. No seriously, you can turn your walls from THIS: To THIS: The walls at my school just so happen to be…
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Ending your year with a BANG!
If your social media feed is anything like mine, then I’m sure you’ve seen some variation of this activity year after year. I’m about to conclude my seventh year of teaching and I’ve never done a countdown to celebrate the fun and excitement that comes with ending another year of school. It took the idea…
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Writers Block
There are many things that make being a teacher hard. For me, one of the hardest is trying to navigate where my entire class is at in the writing process. Some kids work faster than their peers while others work much slower. When you add absences into the mix it becomes nearly impossible for me…
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Pencil Gate
Eight years later and I finally found the most effective way to save pencils and make them last longer. I am not sure how, but every single year I seem to lose hundreds of pencils into a mysterious blackhole inside of my classroom. No, really. I can set out a brand new pack of Dixon…
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Student Engagement Slump?
First of all, every teacher experiences it, so don’t take it personally. (Seriously, we’ve ALL been there!) The trick, however, is finding ways to get out of your slump. Most teachers agree that higher levels of engagement mean higher levels of achievement, so finding things to do in your classroom to increase engagement are vitally…
Teacher Talks A Lot 