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You're in the right place for action steps and take-aways if you're a busy Middle School ELA teacher who prefers personal family time over prepping for class. You want to teach with confidence while also leaving at a very decent time each day. On that note, welcome to the library where I only share the kind of recommendations + advice that'll uplevel your classroom without taking away from your personal life.
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Latest from the Blog
Text Features: Who Cares?
Text Features Concrete to Abstract How do we get students to not only understand what a text feature is, but to know why it’s important and why it matters? Wait a sec–do our students even know what the word “feature” means,
Text Structures: Who Cares?
Text Structures Concrete to Abstract How do we get students to not only understand what a text structure is, but to know why it’s important and why it matters? Back up– do our students even know what the word “structure” means, much less what “text” and “structure” mean together? If
Close Reading, Annotating, Text Evidence
Close Reading Skills & Annotating Stop the excessive underlining and highlighting! Close reading skills don’t happen by accident— it’s a skill set that, when implemented effectively, helps to engage readers and keep kids mentally focused as well as physically engaged. When done correctly, it can put an end to reading
Easy Email Templates for Busy Teachers
Struggling with what to say to a parent through email? It can be tricky putting things in writing sometimes, and it’s easy to suddenly lose an hour of your precious time trying to get the words just right when it involves a parent and a student. There are several reasons
Best Paid APPS for Teachers
Ok, people. You get what you pay for. I discovered this the hard way. Well… I take that back. Not so much the hard way per se, but I discovered this in the the annoying, inconvenient, waste-of-my-time kind of way. Free apps are awesome for personal use because I don’t
Responding to Ridiculous, Angry Parent Emails (Part Two)
Responding to Ridiculous and Angry Parent Emails! 3 More Scenarios to Help You! I split this into two blog posts: 3 scenarios here and then the first 3 appeared in last week’s blog post, here. The following scenarios are real situations that happened to me either this year or last year. I obviously
Responding to Ridiculous, Angry Parent Emails (Part One)
Quirky Situation + Angry Parent + What to Say Via Email = All Better! As a busy teacher, we all know how time-consuming it can be when a situation arises and a parent’s scathing email comes through. It’s always at the worst possible time, too! We either check our email
How to Get Kids to Take Ownership during PBL
Project Based Learning (PBL) Helping Students Take Ownership of Their Learning Ok, let’s be real here: Anytime you give 12 year-olds a project and then release them to go work on it, there’s going to be some chaos. Here’s what PBL is supposed to look like in my 6th
I’m Too Freakin’ Sick to Teach Today!
Too Sick to Teach… But I’m Not Exactly Sick Enough to Stay Home, Either! What can we do on those days that it’s not quite bad enough to stay home, and it’s too much work or it’s too late to get a sub for your classes? Well, every
5 Things to Say When They Want Your Time!
NOW what are they wanting me to do? Ok, so it’s easy to get caught off-guard when someone asks or tells you to help with yet another after-school or evening activity . It’s easy to get cornered and swept into the whole “help us with XYZ after school because it’s
How to Leave Work at Work
How do you really use your meager conference time/planning time? Whatever paltry amount of time you have for planning during the school day, use it to actually get stuff done. Living life first, then teaching, won’t happen if you’re not even being productive during planning time. I know you’re exhausted
“Why Don’t You Have Time for Me?”
Here’s what happened in my class a few weeks ago that I can’t get out of my mind: In the middle of Language Arts class on Tuesday, sweet little Desiree asked me if I could help her with her test corrections (the test our school district so graciously provides for
Work Email on Your Device is a Time-Suck!
Keep your work/school email OFF of your personal smartphone. It’s pretty convenient to just have your school email go straight to your phone so you can respond to messages while standing in line at the copy machine, or while waiting for the kids to come in from the next class.
Writing Activities Kids Need (Easy to Grade)!
Hint: Holistic Grading is the best thing since sliced bread. The cross that we bear as Language Arts teachers is all the freakin’ writing we have to grade for our students. (But, yeah, they NEED to be writing!!) Let’s give our students lots of writing opportunities without us actually having
Using Pinterest for Thinking and Writing
I don’t know if you can really do this every day… It definitely depends on how much class time you have. It’s more important to just do it consistently, whatever that means for you and your classes. So maybe twice a week, give your students a free-writing topic. To make it
