Foundation for Every Lesson this Year!! Genre Sort
In your EW guides, section one is all about genre and author's purpose. For me, this is not a skill I teach at the beginning of the year and then never talk about again! I want my students to [...]
Sentence Variety/Types of Sentences
I thought you would all like to have this idea to start the year off! I created this template for my students to use throughout the year to practice writing simple, compound, and complex [...]
NEW ELAR TEKS- Building Oral Language
When I first began teaching, I was in a first-grade classroom at a district that was a big advocate for balanced literacy. As an inexperienced first-year teacher, I was fortunate that I had an [...]
Feelings- Show Not Tell
Empowering Writers' guides are meant to be used with any topic or unit that you are teaching about. The lessons can be taught with books that you already use in your classroom. At the beginning of [...]
Building Schema
What a busy last few weeks I have had with my family. I worked most of June, and was really looking forward to a little family time on our summer vacation! Last week, my husband and I took our [...]
Teaching Point of View
There are lots of fun mentor text out there for teaching point of view, but here is a lesson I did in my class, as an independent practice, after teaching the skill through those great read aloud [...]
A Little Red, White, & Blue
"Children in the United States of America have been reciting the Pledge of Allegiance since 1892 - and for about that long, they’ve found its big words confusing. Now, beloved children’s book [...]
Analytical Thinking
Literal vs. Inferential thinking… Many of our students struggle to move past the literal meaning (What is right there in front of them) to the inferential meaning (What we can learn that is not [...]
Breaking News & Current Events
My students love when I bring breaking news stories and current events into my classroom. Here is an example using an article from the New York Times [...]
Making EW Your Own
This summer I am extremely lucky to get to be sharing my love for reading and writing with teachers all around. This last week, I was in Fort Smith, Arkansas where I got to spend a few days [...]