It's hard to get students to pay attention to spelling and grammar when there's so much else going on in their lives, isn't it? ...

  Your students *sort of* know the different text structures, right?  They might even be able to remember 1 or 2 of them.   But do they real...

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...