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The Teacher Studio

Learning, thinking, creating

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Responding to Reading Character Prompts: Gradual Release Model

I often hear teachers stressing out about how they can get everything they need ready for all their book groups, standards-based grading, and so on.  Sometimes I think we work WAY too hard--and I always work to try to do best quality instruction without driving myself into the ground.  We focus on characters throughout the school year. The easiest way I do this is that I have a bank of resources ... Read the Post

Spring Bulletin Board Project: Writing, Culture Building, Creativity

Every year I try to break us out of our long Wisconsin winters by taking an hour or so of class time to create a spring bulletin board that brightens our spirits!  Today I thought I'd share a little bit about what we do--and why we do it!  I so often hear people say, "We don't have time for cute projects anymore."  I certainly agree that I do LESS than I used to--but I definitely believe that ... Read the Post

Helping Students Fall In Love With Books: A Reading Intervention

One group of students who I think we often ignore is those students who are solid readers, are compliant--but aren't "engaged readers".  We know that students learn to read by READING, so if they aren't reading at home and aren't challenging themselves at school, their progress will be impacted. Getting Students Talking About Books This is exactly what I have been going through with one ... Read the Post

Reading interventions, “Ready Freddy”, and chapter book strategies!

Fourth grade reading is tough.  Many students have "unlocked" the key to reading...they can read most of the words and can track ever-increasing storylines.  As teachers, we can provide countless texts for them, coach them, model for them, and know that they will continue to become more sophisticated as readers. Unfortunately, there are still some students who haven't made this jump. It ... Read the Post

Tips and Ideas for Teaching Narrative Writing

Today is my day to blog over at Upper Elementary Snapshots! Check out my ideas about teaching leads, reviewing other skills, a quick writing revision idea--and more!  Here's a sneak peek at part of it... Stop by if you want to check out what I did with our second narrative writing unit of the year.  This is really one of my favorite writing activities because it is SO accessible to ... Read the Post

Grading Writing Made Easy. Really.

Because I know you do not have enough time to grade writing--or do everything else we need to do! My district requires us to use a pretty substantial rubric to go with our required writing assessments--and we are welcome to use it for others.  Here's the problem.  It's 2 1/2 pages long!  Not only that, it makes a LOT of assumptions about what my students should be doing with ... Read the Post

A Balanced Approach to Fractions: Wholes, Sets, and Measurement

Welcome back!  If you have been following this series of blog posts all about fractions and improving our fraction instruction and learning, I welcome you to day 3!  If you are new to the series, feel free to snoop around at POST 1 and POST 2 when you have time for more foundation information about teaching fractions. Today I want to focus on something I briefly touched upon in that first ... Read the Post