School and the City

Opinion writing is my favorite! There are SO MANY fun ways to practice forming and supporting opinions. I've done candy wars, Chandra's sweet vs. sour , and other fun topics. However, writing data has shown my grade level that are students are showing weakness in supporting opinions with examples and citing text-evidence. We turned to one of our favorite resources for nonfiction texts - ReadWorks.org . ReadWorks is free for educators, so if you don't have an account yet, make one RIGHT NOW. (Seriously, now!) So we picked some articles from ReadWorks that could provide some prompts for our opinion writing unit. We let our students choose from 4 prompts: Should we have year-round school? Should students wear uniforms? Should people be allowed to own exotic pets? Should dogs work? After they chose their topics, I gave them the corresponding article(s) from ReadWorks. I gave them time to sit with students that had chosen the same topic to read and discuss the texts...

As long as I've been a teacher, I've had parents ask me for book suggestions. I struggle the most with suggesting books for advanced readers. So many popular book series are set in middle school and contain content that I consider inappropriate for my elementary students. My third graders don't need to be reading about girlfriends/boyfriends, over the top violence, any reference to alcohol or illegal substances, or foul language. In order to be able to suggest books to parents that are academically challenging yet age-appropriate, I've compiled this list with the help of Scholastic Book Wizard , Common Sense Media , GoodReads , and some teacher friends on Instagram . I hope it helps you out! Level P: Wayside School series Rescue Princesses series Puppy Patrol series Level Q: American Girl Doll series Who Is...? / What Is...? series Little House series Level R: I Survived... series E.B. White books (Charlotte's Web, Stuart Little...) Y...

There are so many professional resources out there for teachers to use to grow their practices, but it's so hard to know where to invest your time and money. I plan to honestly review some popular resources, and I'm starting with one of my favorites: The Reading Strategies Book by Jennifer Serravallo.  The book is organized into 13 chapters, each named with a reading goal, beginning with fluency, moving towards comprehension of fiction and nonfiction, and ending with writing about reading.  Pros : Strategies are for reading levels A to Z. Each goal has its own super-organized table of contents, ordered by increasing reading level. Each page is set up the same way. Each page tells relevant reading levels and text types are appropriate to be used with the strategy, which smaller skills can be tied in, and additional tips. Servallo even gives you child-appropriate language and prompts to use when teaching.  Each page provides some sort of visual aid, whe...