What a pleasure it was to “see” all of you today at the Soar to Success Summit with Vanessa and Pre-K Pages! I love sharing my passion for igniting confidence in young children when it comes to writing! Handouts that…
Soar to Success Summit Presentation
A Special 2020 Welcome Back
My best friend Rachel, is an amazing Kindergarten teacher! A few days ago she posted these touching words on her personal facebook page. I asked if she would allow me to share them with more teachers via my blog and…
Distance Learning: Stepping Stones
“The difference between stumbling blocks and stepping stones is how you use them.” – Unknown Stumbling blocks or stepping stones? What times we are living in now, with such a large distance between us and our students. In our presentations,…
Writer’s Workshop: Paper Choices
So many options for PAPER in Writer’s Workshop, right? You of course could just have your students write in a notebook, but we miss a lot of opportunity to scaffold the writing kids do by providing the paper. And- with…
Author’s Craft and Mentor Texts
There are all kinds of buzz words in education, aren’t there? I mean, you hear about differentiation, rigorous learning, best practice, anchor charts, balanced literacy, mentor texts, collaborative learning, models, word walls, and so much more. Sometimes it can be…
Would You Rather?
I’ve been sharing an idea for the Writing Work Station for years! It’s called WOULD YOU RATHER! You have a bunch of questions ready to go and students have to WRITE their answers- of course also taking into account the…
Classroom Organization: PART ONE
Please enjoy this guest blog post from Central Texas Organizers… we can all learn a thing or two about letting go! I STILL have a storage unit of teacher stuff? Don’t tell anyone! When to Let Go As a classroom…
BIG Back to School LOVE from LEACH
Here we are…the dog days of summer…hot, hot, and more hot. And yet, we are now thinking back-to-school. Back to work. Break over. For so many, this is a super stressful time. We either avoid going up to school to…
TOP TEN Document for the New ELAR TEKS from Leach
At this point, you are all quite aware that Texas has adopted and is in full implementation of the new ELAR standards for the upcoming school year. There will be oodles of trainings on the new standards, the way…
Accountability for Independent Reading
So, we know that independent reading is MORE than just get out your books these days! It is part of a Reader’s Workshop! So starting as early as KINDERGARTEN students are self-selecting several texts, keeping those texts in their personal…
Digital Work Board for Work Stations
Do you use a work board during Literacy Workstations? If you’ve been to our presentation on Work Stations you do! Lots of teachers use a pocket chart like this one below to help students become independent during rotation time. A…