One of the most frequently asked questions that I get from educators is 'What is the best way to teach my students to read critically?' The answer is complex and deserves a full day, week, or year discussion. The best place to start with your students is to make sure your students use genre knowledge to process texts. Yes, genre knowledge is the foundation of comprehension!
Striving for accuracy is the seeking or desiring exactness or something to be even better than before. When I think about accuracy I think about perfection. While it is impossible to be perfect, it's not impossible to strive to be better than you were before. I love this quote from William J.H. Boetcker, “Never mind what others do; do better than yourself, beat your own record from day to day, and you are a success.” Teach your students that striving to be better each day is more important than simply being perfect. This can be a great tie-in when you are goal setting and tracking student progress in the new year!
With the spring semester beginning, we are all thinking about those end-of-year expectations and assessments. It's easy to dread this time of year if it seems we are spending all our time preparing for a test, rather than teaching and helping students developing skills, strategies and processes they need for life. Instead of loathing this time of year, we can embrace it and look to providing our students with engaging and authentic practice. It's time to "show off" what they have learned and become proficient in! It's a great time to have fun with all the skills they have learned so far.
Language comes before literacy. Young learners need to listen, look, talk and question. Try our Questions and Answers activity during your morning circle time to get students producing language with increasing ease and accuracy.
Good writers are intentional. They can take any topic they know a lot about and write for a variety of purposes. In this handout, teachers and students choose a topic and brainstorm one-to-three central ideas for each purpose.
For teachers, this is a tool for planning to write around a topic of study. Think about how writing helps you will know if students are grasping important concepts and understandings. This tool will help you plan quick writes, as well as essay prompts.
This is a great activity for helping students learn about purpose-driven writing. Writers need to make decisions and one of the most important decisions is "what is the purpose of my writing?"
For more information, visit the online resources on the Write for Texas website.
Writing is a macro-process that must be chunked into digestible pieces. Writing demands that the writer make a series of complex decisions. In order to develop proficiency, instruction must be carefully planned.
This resource helps teachers as they plan a unit of study for writing. Notice how the learning targets reflect a part of the standard and build towards mastery of the standard. Be sure to check your grade level standards to ensure you are using the targets that relate to grade level expectations.
The Art of Seeing Alternatives
The skill of a great thinker in to be able to think flexibly. When we think flexibly we see other prospectives, generate alternatives, and consider other options. It's easy to say, "That's impossible" or "That will never work" but, being able to look at the situation and try to solve it or think flexibly is the sign of a growth mindset!
When we choose texts for our students to read, we should choose texts that require students to use the metacognitive strategies in our learning targets to process the text and capture students' interests! Texts can and should be used more than once. Think of how many times you have watched your favorite movie. Each time, you discover or learn something new. It's a great time of the year to use texts that focus on our American traditions and history while having fun reading various types of texts.
Rounding Up the Rhyme is a great phonics activity to use in the primary grades. Patricia Cunningham developed this activity to be used during the Working on Words time in your classroom. Here are the six easy steps to implementing this activity in your classroom!
You will never get a second chance to make a first impression. The same rings true for the way we learn. Brain research tells us that we remember what we see the first time we see it. The first way our brain views something is a strong imprint. Seeing grammar, mechanics, and spelling incorrectly used is meaningless for most learners, but it is what they are likely to remember. It's very difficult to change and see it correctly used. Students need to spend a lot of time seeing, thinking, and experimenting with grammar and mechanic rules correctly before finding errors.
