The Blog
Teaching Main Idea Vs. Theme
If your students are anything like mine, they have an incredibly difficult time telling the difference between main idea and theme. Before this year, I had always taught the skills in isolation. Main Idea first, followed by Theme a few…
Anchor Charts | Comprehension | Literacy | Literacy Anchor Charts | Reading Skills | Using Pictures to Teach
Using Pictures to Teach Key Reading Skills
I blog a lot about how I use pictures to teach key reading skills, and I’m passionate about their impact on student learning. If you’re familiar with my blog, you have probably noticed students working with pictures in many, many…
Anchor Charts | Literacy | Literacy Anchor Charts | Math | Math Anchor Charts | Novel Study | Novel Study | Novels & Picture Books
Ratios and Mysteries!
Sometimes I’m hesitant to post anchor charts because I don’t have a ton of information or activities to go with them, but I thought I’d go for it anyway! These are two that we have done this week as we…
Fiction Comprehension
We spent a few days before state testing doing some quick review activities for answering fiction comprehension questions. We had spent A LOT of time on nonfiction comprehension over the past several months, but I wanted to be sure we…
Task Cards | Anchor Charts | Free | Literacy | Literacy Anchor Charts | Using Pictures to Teach | Writing
Figurative Language Review
I have been trying to write this post for two weeks now! Between home, school and a few new resources I have been working on, I haven’t had a spare second. So, here’s what we did for our figurative language…
Anchor Chart Storage Solutions
Happy Sunday, and welcome to another month of Bright Ideas! I am teaming up with Shelly at Teaching in the Early Years as well as over 150 other bloggers to bring you a monthly “bright idea.” I’m a little bit sheepish…
Literacy | Anchor Charts | Literacy Anchor Charts | Reading Skills | Task Cards | Using Pictures to Teach
Teaching Point of View
I absolutely love teaching point of view! We have been busy working on point of view, and most specifically, on how an author’s point of view impacts how a story is written or told. I loved some of the activities…
Easy ways to teach students Summarizing, Paraphrasing, and Quoting Texts
Teaching students the difference between summarizing, paraphrasing, and quoting texts is such an incredibly crucial skill. We are SO close to finishing our nonfiction unit, and I’m looking forward to jumping back into novel studies. My students are slowly growing…
Tell Me a Story Tuesday!
It has been a while since I have featured a Tell Me a Story Tuesday post around here! I made a copy for each study and had them glue it in the center of a large piece of construction paper….
Informational Text Structures & Features Cumulative Assignment
Last week, we finished our final project for our nonfiction text features and structures study. Now, we are working on summarizing nonfiction and making inferences from nonfiction. I’m having to get quite creative in order to keep my kids engaged…
Nonfiction Summaries
I’m popping in to share an activity I did to get kids thinking about summarizing nonfiction texts. I got this idea from the fantastic Kristine Nannini at Young Teacher Love. She blogged about their classroom anchor chart where they discussed…
Making Sense of Multiplying and Dividing Fractions Word Problems
If you teach the upper grades, you likely know how maddening it is to try to teach your students the difference between a multiplication word problem and a division word problem when it comes to fractions. Everything we have taught…
