I LOVE walking into book stores. The feel, smell, and sight of new books and unknown stories makes me HAPPY! That feeling that I get when I walk into a Barnes and Nobles is the SAME feeling that I want my kiddos to feel when they walk into our classroom library. Here are some quick tips and thoughts to help you spice up your classroom library and make it a magical, calming, and happy place from my show on the ITeachTVNetwork. ...
Archives for 2015
Make Social Studies Fun Part 1
Social Studies can be a hard subject to teach. Not many kiddos just LOVE learning about history, and our new TN standards are HARD...good but HARD! :) So, I have been adding as many simulations as possible to our learning curriculum. A huge shout out goes to the TPT seller The Sweetest Thing for her massive unit on Westward Expansion. This activity came from a part of her unit. If you teach 4th/5th grade SS then you want to own this bundle! The students had spent a lot of time before this unit discussing the WHY of Westward Expansion. Why did we move west? What were some causes for our expansion? And so on. After they had a good understanding of the "why", we moved on to the "how". There is an amazing History Channel documentary out there that discusses the Transcontinental Railroad beautifully. I highly recommend purchasing this DVD to go with it. It really helped my students with comprehending just how big of a deal this railroad was and how difficult it was to build ...
How We “Do” Book Raffles
I am so excited to finally put together this post! Book raffles have truly inspired readers in my classroom, and I am so thankful for the inspiration from some of my favorite bloggers who encouraged me to add this tradition to my classroom this year. My only regret is not doing it sooner. Before you read this post...PLEASE know that you can add book raffles to your classroom NO MATTER WHAT grade you teach. ALL students can benefit from this exciting reading/learning activity. One of my biggest goals this year was to help create a community of readers-students who wanted to read without me telling them to, who shared what they were reading with others, who got up in front of the class to give their feedback on their book to their classmates, and who would beg me to buy new books over and over again. There have been a lot of ways that I have been working hard to make this goal a reality and book raffles has been one of those ways. What do you do ...