Words Matter! Vocabulary Instruction that Sticks “Mom! My brother knocked over my magnatiles and that’s not constructive!” My four year old cries at me from her room. After mitigating the disaster that is inevitable between siblings, especially when one is four and the other not quite 2 years old, I reflected with pride on…
We all want our students to make meaningful growth in their reading and writing. But too often we get stuck with supporting our students and our feedback is generic rather than specific. By using a student facing tool like a microprogression we can show our students exactly what we hope they will apply in their…
This school year, amongst the many goals in a school day, we know teachers are working hard to help accelerate their students in reading. And one of our goals is to provide you with high leverage instructional moves for your classroom and especially your small group instructional time. There’s a big buzz around decodable…
If you are a teacher, you know the power of a great read aloud in your classroom. You have those beloved books that you go back to year after year, because they provoke strong emotions and meaningful conversations with your students. Those books help you teach multiple strategies and best of all, model for students…
Does your classroom reflect a balance of rich reading, authentic writing, fundamental word study skills or phonics, and joyous read alouds? Does your practice release responsibility of the cognitive heavy-lifting gradually to your students through thinking aloud, explicit modeling, guided practice, and independent application? Has post-common core testing caused you to rethink every anchor chart…
If you read the March blog article titled, Shepherding Students through the Gates of PCR, did you find yourself thinking, “What shifts in my instruction will be necessary to usher students through the gates of thinking about complex text?” Did the linear progression through the gates of analysis, inference, and synthesis offer intrigue…along with yearning…
The arrival of Common Core State Standards is now five years in our collective rear view mirror. But how far have we come in our instructional practices? With PARCC and Smarter Balanced assessments (or next generation-MCAS in Massachusetts) looming, a new sense of urgency appears in our headlights: prose constructed response (PCR). These new performance…
Rolling out your classroom library this fall is sure to spark a reading frenzy in your classroom. While this positive energy sets independent reading in motion, it can also entail management woes for teachers weeding through bins of misplaced books. If Harry Potter is hiding out in the “Magical Stories” bin when it should be…
Short, Explicit, & Robust … but Recorded Do you remember a time when you listened to a teacher drone on and on about a subject? Have you ever (unwittingly) been that teacher yourself? Mini-lessons used to be a good answer to that struggle. However, this year especially, with our hybrid and remote school settings, we…