The Common Core Reading standards are fast becoming a bit of genius to me. As I help teachers plan and devise approaches to unit organization, I notice a nature staircase or actual set of building blocks that exist naturally in the standards. The Reading for Literature Standards are progressive. While common core has not explicitly told teachers to introduce the concepts in order,… Read more →
Every so many years, there seems to be some shift in education. The pattern is inevitably uniform each time: Something is wrong in education that no one can fix. A new innovation promises to deliver the solution to wipe out this problem. As educators, we just need to get on board with the new, shiny, and nicely packaged new solution… Read more →
The skill set for Common Core is pretty static. There are NOT a lot of skills. For literature there are ten skills. TEN. For Georgia Educators who have been here for a while, mentioning the word QCC conjures up images of hundreds of skills that had to be taught just for reading. This shifts how we look at ELA instruction…. Read more →
Being the uber dork that I openly admit to being, I am already anxiously anticipating next school year. Our school will be teaching a new English course: Multicultural Literature. As I plan excerpts and short text that I want to use with my students, I am working hard to offer a variety of options and diverse literature. As any public… Read more →
I am excited! I have read some great reviews on Hunger Games! I am dying to teach it to my tenth graders next semester. The engagement level is high and it offers an interesting spin on the hero’s journey. To add to my excitement, I bought MY FIRST Kindle book—yes—Hunger Games a few weeks ago. To add to my excitement… Read more →
If you use Google to search for reading sources for your students, particularly elementary school students, it can be very frustrating. You typically find such a wide range of materials that are typically above their grade level. This results in more time spent, weeding through what is good and what is useless. Google has a much underused tool for searching… Read more →
While I am no longer an elementary school teacher, I do appreciate all things literacy based for any age range. A wonderful tool that helps to teach reading for elementary school students is Christopher Thorne’s site, Mr. Thorne Does Phonics. This site includes numerous engaging phonics videos! The site focuses on phoneme segmentation, divided into six different segments. The general… Read more →
Storybird is a very user friendly collaborative storytelling site! It makes it easy to create stories digitally and present them in a professional, aesthetically appealing manner. Users can even collaborate and produce a digital storybook together. Storybird has a wide appeal. Elementary through high school students can use this application! For primary students, this tool would allow them to publish… Read more →
