Are you looking to refresh your students reading skills for the second half of the school year? Everyone talks about the summer slump, but the winter break slump is real too! Here are five easy ways to incorporate reading comprehension practice with reading passages into your routine to help get your students back on track. 1. Independent Reading Skill Review Briefly go over the skill(s) you need to cover as a group. I love watching BrainPop videos on the skill for a quick refresher. You can also complete a quick anchor chart together! Assign the skill for students to work through. The 12 reading skills included in the winter passages are: Main Idea and Details Cause and Effect Theme Context...
If you teach reading you have probably heard of the “Reading Wars”. And if you haven’t, then perhaps you don’t even need to read any further. For those that have, you might feel confused. I, for example, question why we have to “be at war” with colleagues or pick a side. I don’t want to be at war or pick a side. But the tension on Twitter and Facebook is real. In essence the debate is about how best to teach reading to students. But many educators wonder if we can believe in both balanced literacy and the science of reading? Simply put, yes. Take a deep breath and know that no matter where you stand on these matters, you don’t...
Teaching multilingual children is a gift. It’s truly a joy. In my own classroom, I learned so much from my students, especially those that spoke more than one language. Over the years, one thing I learned from experience as well as through professional learning is that each student deserves to be seen and served individually. No one size fits all approach works. While differentiation may seem daunting, it’s actually not that scary. Dr. Stephen Fleenor describes differentiation as “not creating individualized lessons...it is creating environments in which students at all different levels, all different proficiencies...can each thrive and each grow one level up in that lesson”. Dr. Fleenor offers two wise suggestions for creating of environments that offer differentiation: Offering open...
Hello! Greetings! Howdy! Welcome to a celebration of English, the language of Venus and Serena Williams, The Beatles, Michelle Yeoh, Idris Elba, and Priyanka Chopra—a global language with global appeal! You'll find English while online shopping, scrolling through TikTok, and in hostels around the world, so naturally learners have many reasons to explore and study the wide world of English. And wide it is! Much wider than the British Isles and North America—English is a beautiful, dynamic language, and its popularity (spoken by more than 1.5 billion people around the world) might make you think you know everything about the language already. But there are a few surprises about English that new learners should know! Where did English come from?...
Do you know what goes on in your eye and brain when you watch a movie, read a book, or look out a window? Let’s look at how a camera works to help us understand how our sense of sight works. A camera needs three parts to function correctly. These are a lens, an image sensor, and an SD card. Your eye is similar to a camera. It needs an iris, lens, and retina to work correctly. The lens of a camera controls the amount of light entering the camera. If too much or too little light is allowed to reach the film, the final picture will turn out too dark or too light. The iris of your eye works...
