Dice and bingo dabbers are two of my favorite cheap, engaging, and versatile classroom tools. Today I’m going to share ways you can use them for math and reading activities in your classroom as part of my September series. This month I will share how you can use items you already have in your classroom to engaging students and enhance learning!…
Reading centers that are engaging for your students and cheap and easy for you? What if I told you that you also don’t have to change them all year and you can still differentiate at the same time? No, this isn’t the beginning of a really terrible joke, it is the reality in my classroom! And I’m excited to share…
How do you prevent the summer slide without requiring a lot of time or supplies while making it meaningful and engaging? That’a a tall order, but not impossible! Today I’m going share the BRAINtain program that saves you prep time, is easy for parents to use, and engages students daily! So, what is BRAINtain anyway? BRAINtain is a combination of…
When I first started teaching, the New Jersey standards required my first graders to learn to count coins up to 99 cents. It was always an extremely difficult concept because it require a lot of skill at once (skip count by different amount, identifying coins and remembering their value, addition etc) Thankfully, the standards have since been revised, and new…
Struggling writers. I will never forget the Aha moment when I realized WHY writing was so hard for my students. It was my second year of teaching, mid-writing lesson, mid way through our year in first grade. I had modeled, read great mentor texts, modeled, modeled, and modeled some more, and it JUST didn’t seem to be helping the majority…