The teams will each send one Swatter forward at a time. My swatters stand on the game line I made on my classroom floor with electrical tape while I am reading the clue. Once I read the clue, I say “go!” and the students compete to see whose fly swatter will touch the correct answer first.
For the next few posts, I will be discussing some fun vocabulary games that I use with my high school students before vocabulary tests that do not involve the teacher spending an unrealistic amount of time getting it ready. These games can easily be adapted to any kind of test review, and your students will…
I think I have been such a slack teacher lately. I’d love to be that Pinterest teacher or the Mrs. Frizzle teacher everyone loves, but right now I’m just trying to get through this semester. I haven’t even posted to my blog but once a year lately! I am teaching full time and working on…
I would like to personally thank each and every person who read my post last week that expressed my concerns about Common Core English. My regular teaching blog, which is normally a mode of sharing teaching strategies (and read by a handful of people), turned political last week for the first time. An edited version…
Below, in jargon-free, acronym-free terms, is my list of what I consider to be the worst of the worst with Common Core English.
Fair warning: This is not my usual type of post, but I hope you get inside my heart for a little while and get inspired. I wrote the majority of this post 2.5 years ago. I think I’m ready to share it now that I’ve got my inner Meredith back. This is the last day…
Every experienced ELA teacher has felt that moment of utter frustration when he or she realizes that very few students completed their homework or students completed it but cheated. This is especially true for those dreaded spelling or vocabulary worksheets — the boring, but necessary — or are they? I have recently experienced much success…
The Socratic Seminar has been done many different ways over the years. I have seen versions that maintain the teacher as question writer and moderator; I have also seen and used the “fish bowl” model where some students are participants and others are assessors; there is also a hot seat and philosopher’s chair version of…
For years, I have contemplated about writing a blog. I thought about blogging on cooking or crafting or writing because I enjoy all of those things, but when you get down to it, when you really get down to the nitty gritty of who I am and what I love, there is nothing in this…
It’s Lit Time! 