Welcome to Part Two of my series on balancing literacy instruction! While I’m a huge fan of explicit instruction, the benefits of implicit instruction are also great. What’s a teacher to do?? Just joining us? Make sure you check out the first post in this series: Challenging Text VS Instructional Level Text Part Two: Explicit Instruction VS […]
Readers' Workshop
Balancing Literacy Instruction. Part One: Challenging Text VS Instructional Level Text
I’m excited to introduce a series of posts on a topic that is near to my heart and constantly on my mind these days: balancing literacy instruction. Over the next few weeks, I’ll tackle what I see as some of the major arguments (in no particular order), provide some research, and add my humble opinion […]
Engaging Learners with Interdisciplinary Teaching
As educators, we are constantly hearing how important it is to make our curriculum relevant to students, and that the students need to have ownership and find value in their learning. It seems to me that the obvious solution is to actively teach more social studies. While social studies is written in every elementary curriculum, […]
Encouraging Readers
As a mom of three boys, a teacher to many students, and an educator of educators, I am constantly battling questions about students’ reading levels. Teachers also frequently ask questions like how many times students should read the same book, and if it matters what students are reading (magazines, graphic novels, etc.). Truthfully, I haven’t seen any research that proves a […]
Growing Readers in Middle School
This month I was hired to do the best job imaginable, model a Readers’ Workshop. At the end of March I took a whole cart of great fiction (mostly off the Lone Star Reading List) into 6 different sixth grade classrooms, with the one goal of hooking kids on a book. I prepared a mini-lesson […]