A head's up:  This blog post has links to nonfiction resources and it's chock-full of information!  All the reasons to read nonficti...

  It might be scary to try.  But honestly, it's not that hard to do as long as you have systems in place. Kids love having choices.  The...

Have you ever encountered grumbling from students that sounds like, "Why do we have to learn about this?  We're never going to use ...

Holly-Mei has recently moved with her family from Toronto, Canada to Hong Kong because of her mother's new - and pretty high-pressure j...

  How did I manage to miss this book when it came out in October 2020?   A friend lent me a copy to read, recently.   And this is not one yo...

 I went for a walk in the park the other day and I was thinking about how beautiful the day was.  That got me thinking about how my students...

A year or so ago, I reread  Summer of the Monkeys  by Wilson Rawls.  And fell in love with the book all over again.  Rawls captures boy-inno...

I have a thought! I remember hoping at this time of the year when I was in the classroom, that I'd have more energy, the days being long...

   I was never a fan of giving up the structure of the school year once state testing was over.  That didn't mean we didn't have fun...

"I like Percy Jackson but that's it."   "I don't like myths or fables. “Really?  What if you could write your own? ” ...

  What do you do when you want to recognize Earth Day but you don't have the time to take away from Reading and Writing instruction?  Es...

  I recently came across some notes for something I'd wanted to try from early 2020.  I had watched a brief video somewhere, probably on...

"The theme is that they tried harder and persevered." Sigh. Yeah, no. Keep reading to see what I do to teach theme (and to downloa...

  There are lots of good reasons to get your students involved in a March Madness Reading Challenge.  I'm only giving you three because ...

  There's no doubt in my mind why Freewater by Amina Luqman-Dawson won the Newbery this year!  It's historically accurate, filled wi...

  You probably know Alan Gratz from Refugee and his many other books about World War II, or maybe Ground Zero, about the World Trade Center ...