2018 | Mentoring in the Middle
A group of teachers and I are each taking two products apiece and putting them on sale on December 30th and 31st.  Click on either of the...
Remember doing math pages in school where you solved some kind of riddle?  I loved those!  They were fun and challenging, and you didn'...
As you prepare your classroom  with Winter resources for next year (gulp! Will it really be 2019?) you're going to want to buy some ...
True confession.  Sometimes I feel like most other people "get it" when it comes to social media, and I'm late to the party.  ...
I wrote about my frustration with getting some of my students reading a few posts ago, and how Pernille Ripp's blog post reminded me t...
Last week, we spent a fair amount of time looking at nonfiction text structures, something that my students "sort of" knew. I ...
This was one bizarre book!  But I loved it!  Think Lord of the Flies  meets Holes at Alcatraz.    When I handed this book off to my studen...
I love read-aloud time in my classroom.  It's one of my favorite things to do.  This is time for kids to sit back and listen to good ...
This book won the Newbery Award last year, and so I knew it was going to be good.  After all, lots of people, who make more time to read g...
"I just don't like reading all that much," he said, as he put another book back on the shelf. We'd talked about books...
How do you accommodate the needs of many different learners in your ELA class?  This year, there seems to be a greater distance between my s...
I'm a huge fan of Jordan Sonnenblick, whom I've met once or twice.  He's such a nice guy.  And he gets middle schoolers, having ...
I was introduced to BOOM cards two years ago.  Since that time, I've heard rave reviews from primary teachers about how much their kid...
Ruta Sepetys takes little nuggets of history and turns them into powerfully told, hard-to-forget novels.   Fifteen year old Lina, her...
Save Me a Seat  is a lovely pairing of two authors, Sarah Weeks of So B. It  fame and Gita Varadarajan, a second-grade teacher who moved t...
We all look for ways to keep kids reading, and in the upper elementary and middle school grades, the struggle is real.  Fortnite is hard...
This book!   Kate Messner, you threw me a curve ball!   I was reading along, chuckling at some of the antics Charlie had gotten...