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...

"I wanted to say to Mr. Lewis that I'd never really played and I didn't intend to start now.  The other part of me wanted t...

Paper planners that you buy.  Pretty ones that you create and print.  Expensive ones, digital ones....there are so many ways to plan your le...

Happy Back to School Season! It’s that crazy, exciting time of the year again! Getting your classroom ready, organizing a million papers,...