a dash of creativity, a pinch of fun, and a whole lot of learning!
Vocabulary Stats To Know If you’re a primary teacher, you’ve most likely given careful thought to how you will teach phonics this year. Perhaps you have a whole toolkit of fun and engaging activities to teach blending, CVC words, and phonemic awareness skills. But what about vocabulary? Is it okay to wait or put vocabulary instruction off until your students…
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Today, we’re talking all about visual perceptual skills. I’ll share some of these visual perceptual skills with you, give examples, and explain how they can contribute or take away from a child’s ability to read with ease and fluency. You see as primary teachers, it’s easy to get “comfortable” in how we teach and approach reading skills in the classroom. Today, I’m…
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Sometimes, (okay all of the time) we get so busy over the summer that we BLINK and suddenly it’s August 1st. I distinctly remember several August 1st days in my career when I said to myself, “I didn’t get anything done that I wanted to this summer! Where did time go?” I would become a Teaching Tornado as I tried to…
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In this blog post, I have three FREE gift tags to give you for your student gifts at the end of the year! The end of the school year is almost here, and that means that teachers everywhere are busy! It’s time to clean out desks and cupboards, pack away boxes of materials, and store things away for the summer….
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Comprehension instruction can be a challenge for many reading teachers. In this post, I am going to share six books with you that have helped shape how I teach reading comprehension in my classroom. It is no secret to my friends and family that I have a true love of professional resource books about anything and everything to do with education. When…
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Today, we’re going to talk about how to use games and toys in your classroom for increased critical thinking and problem-solving skills! When my first graders graduate college and attend their first job interviews, they will most likely not be asked to state the definition of matter. We would be surprised to find them completing a timed addition test, and…
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We spend a lot of time planning beautiful, standards-based lessons for our students. We cross our t’s and dot our i’s when it comes to a rich introduction, instructional strategies that gradually release independence to the children, and appropriately designed assessments to check for student understanding. But what about those important, foundational, brain-based skills that are not packaged in a…
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