Empty Bulletin Boards

I took all of my strategy charts off of the walls last week. I realized that they were more like posters than instructional aids if I kept them up since they weren’t created alongside my students. I cannot believe how barren my classroom’s walls are, but I know that creating charts with my [...]

Sharing a Notebook Lesson

Aimee Buckner’s Book, Notebook Know-How, is an excellent resource for providing kids with strategies for generating notebook writing. Since many folks who took our poll asserted that they wanted more info on units of study, I figured I’d post a minilesson of mine that is based off of Buckner’s Best and Worst Life Events [...]

Routines I Teach So Things Run Smoothly

Ruth, and many other TWT Readers, have been back-to-school with the kids for weeks. My students, on the other hand, start classes this Tuesday.

I was cleaning out my closet the other day when I came across this paper, which I created before the start of the last school year.

I found it fascinating to review [...]

Combo: 2 questionnaires meshed into one

Literacy Interview

Originally uploaded by teachergal

My colleague recently gave me a copy of a Reading Profile she uses with her students. Loved it! However, it left me realizing that the Writing Interview I’ve given my students in the past would be overkill since that would be two interviews they’d have to fill-out for me. [...]

My Personalized Plan Book Arrived Today!

I blogged about the plan book I was creating a couple of weeks ago. I found that many photo books were just too expensive to create over the summer, plus few had spiral spines. I searched, and searched, & finally found that Lulu.com could allow me to create the exact plan book I [...]

PHOTO FRIDAYS: systems and tools that look pretty

old file tote with new folders

Originally uploaded by teachergal

I have four days left until I head back to school. Granted, I’ll be in my classroom later today putting the finishing touches on the space. However, it seems hard to believe that summer is nearly over.
I’ve been trying to fix-up my systems this year. [...]

Poetry Friday: An Acrostic Poem About Labor Day

I was looking around for a poem about Labor Day on this final summer Friday. (I know, I know… summer goes through mid-September. However, this is the weekend that always feels like the last weekend of summer to me.) I found an acrostic poem by Nicholas Gordon that captures the mood and [...]

Busy???

Who isn’t busy these days? We all are, regardless of where we are in our teaching careers.
I found a fantastic site today, The Busy Teacher’s Cafe, which is put together by a literacy coach from Passaic, NJ. It has lots of targeted links for everything from how to create a class website to [...]

Trying to Banish the Back-to-School Jitters

Postcards to Help with the Eradication of First Day of School Jitters

Originally uploaded by teachergal

I created some postcards to send to my students later today. I’m sending them with the hope that this can help alleviate some of the jitters kids feel when they’re about to head back to school. (Hence the reason [...]

Trading My Favorite Classroom Spaces

Trading Our Favorite Spaces: 1 of 2

Originally uploaded by teachergal

Mary Lee & Franki are hosting something of a blog carnival over at A Year of Reading. It’s called Trading (Our Favorite) Spaces. Click here to learn more about it &/or to submit photos of your favorite space by September 1st.
I’m posting just two [...]

Writing Center

My Students’ New Writing Center

Originally uploaded by teachergal

Last year my students’ writing center was a pretty tall bookcase. The wooden structure, pictured, housed the math center. However, as the amount of math manipulatives I have continues to grow, I had to swap spaces. Hence, the old math center is my students’ new [...]

Stacey’s SOLSC

Warning: Music will come on when you click on this album!

Make a Smilebox scrapbook

Setting up my classroom

Monday-What I’m working on now…

Originally uploaded by teachergal

I’ve been busy setting up my classroom for the past two days. (Hence the reason I haven’t posted much.) Here are two views I’m willing to share with the world. Just click on the image to see the full-size layout with the descriptions of each [...]

SOLSC: The Last One of August

Link your slice to this post by clicking on the image linky below.

It’s time for…

Leave a link to your memory/post by using Mr. Linky.

Unscramble the Teacher’s Motto

When I moved to RI, I borrowed a motto from a former colleague, Halli, in New York. She had a BIG sign over her door that read, “We will work hard, but we will have fun.”
I was playing around with Wordle tonight and created a scrambled motto for my class. I’m [...]

M.M. Inspriation: An Optional & Challenging Charge

Pick an entry, any entry!

Originally uploaded by teachergal

Find an old diary or writer’s notebook. Open it to any page. Let that be the inspiration for this-coming M.M. Even if it’s not what you thought you’d ever write more about, try to run with it.
GOOD LUCK!

Five Shakes of the Rain Stick

Emily Butler-Smith, a staff developer with the TCRWP led an interesting session on classroom management structures at the July Writing Institute. At first, I’m pretty happy with the routines and procedures I’ve established (and honed) over the past few years. However, I truly believe you can always get ideas from others, so I [...]

Recap of T.B.P.S.

Some of the quotes/highlights from our posts, which you can locate at any time by typing “Big Picture Series” into the SEARCH BOX on the top right corner of this blog.

“So many people walk around with a meaningless life. They seem half-asleep, even when they’re busy doing things they think are important. This is because [...]

The Big Picture: Happy Mail!!!

This is the final post of The Big Picture Series. (Ruth stated hers was the last, but after I received some mail from her today, I decided we needed to have just one more post in this Series.)

I returned home from running errands about 30 minutes ago and found a thick, manila envelope in [...]

Poetry Friday: Writer’s Notebook

Here’s a poem from Ralph Fletcher’s book, A Writing Kind of Day.
Writer’s Notebooks
My brother Tom says he’s a hundredaire
with two hundred fifty dollars
in his bank account.
Dad’s a thousandaire.
I gave baby Julia two pennies
so now she’s a pennyaire.
When I look at Julia
her little bald head
reminds me of the planet Earth.
I put that in my writer’s notebook
to [...]

The Big Picture: What’s on your heart?

I used my teaching heart map as an example in the classroom yesterday, which made me go back and look at the past post about it.  I was amazed at how thinking about my teaching heart map soothed my soul and realigned my thinking to the big picture.  As the Big Picture Series comes to [...]

Poems for Kids’ Birthdays

I was on two home visits yesterday. At the first one, the little girl asked me, “Do you know when my birthday is?” I sure did! I knew it because I already put all of my students’ contact information into Outlook, which I syched to my iTouch. However, when I realized [...]

The Big Picture: Honesty

“I’d rather be able to face myself in the bathroom mirror than be rich and famous.”
–Ani DiFranco
I created a handbook of classroom regulations and procedures for my fifth graders during my second and third years of teaching in New York.
Here’s an excerpt from it:
Academic dishonesty (e.g., cheating, copying, plagiarizing) will not be tolerated. [...]

Online Poetry Class (Stanford University)

A few months ago Kirsten Andersen who is a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University visited my classroom. She sat with my students and conferred with them about their poetry. She spent an extraordinary amount of time with my students truly listening to what they had to say about their writing. Even though [...]