Do you need new resources for your classroom?  A team of amazing teachers and I have grouped together to gift one teacher with a $200...

My students were entering a new unit in Social Studies on the first Americans in North America, and I wanted to try something different ...

I hate making seating charts.  It's. My. Least. Favorite. Thing. To. Do. I hate it even more than reading and grading common unit as...

There are 30 days left until Christmas.  What?!  Just typing that is making me freak a little. The holiday season is upon us, and Cy...

Did you know that Pinterest is the third most searched site on the internet, behind Google and Youtube?  That's a lot of people clicki...

I've been listening to some podcasts on my way to and from work lately - Simple Pin, Go-Getters, and Monica Froese - and I've lea...

By the time you get to November, hopefully you've got students reading away!  But sometimes you need to provide a little more incenti...

A lot of teachers don't like to teach writing.  It can be overwhelming to think about how to merge grammar and conventions without tak...

But first, a word....these are my thoughts about fostering a love of reading. Not killing it. I recently received a complementary comm...

I recently talked about how mentor sentences do something *magical* for my students and their writing.  You can read about that here . St...

From the kitchen came a piercing scream. The green colored pencil slipped, streaking across the almost-finished portrait of a lizard Jai...

In the Darfur region of Sudan, Amira wakes up on her twelfth birthday and  Our village glistens, greets me with a wink that shine...

Would your students be able to identify Darfur on a map?  Guatemala?  Syria?  Students have access to so much information from the interne...

My first year of teaching was 2001.  I was in my third week of school when the planes hit the World Trade Center, and my principal came to...