0 ELA Common Core Bulletin Board + Expanding my Blog!

I am lucky and blessed enough in the school district I'm currently in to have a special ed co-teacher who works with me as well as an amazing teacher assistant. I wanted to share the great work she did on a bulletin board for (Thanks, Becky!) Although I consider myself very thorough as a teacher, I sometimes am not the most organized or most artsy-creative person in the world. That's where my co-teacher comes in! I wanted to design a bulletin board that reminded students how to build an argument according to the common core- making a claim and using evidence to prove it.   I have also been teaching my 8th graders strategies I learned...

0 Spooky Tell Tale Heart Lesson for Halloween

' I've been planning for WEEKS and stressing out just to make sure I could do this lesson on Halloween. Things got a little derailed when we had an unexpected 'weather' day Tuesday due to the hurricane that didn't really hit us. But I was still able to do the lesson today on Halloween. For the last three lessons we've been reading Edgar Allan Poe poems and studying his life. Today we read "The Tell Tale Heart" and watched a short You Tube Video that went long with it. The website  Knowing Poe has a great interactive audio along with text for this story. The students followed along and listened to the story and did 'sticky notes'. The...

0 IPad Apps for the Classroom

Today was a professional development day and I was able to play around with my Ipad and test out different Ipad apps to use in the classroom. Our grade level has a cart of Ipads to sign out, and the sixth grade in our school is actually getting 1:1 Ipads. I'd love to get 1:1 Ipads someday but right now it's not a reality, so I have to make do with what I have. Here is a list of the ones I found most useful: Voice Thread: Voice thread allows you to record voice and make notes about a video or snapshot. It really doesn't do anything that amazing, but it's the creative ways teachers are using it that makes it cool. I plan on having students take...

0 Peer Conferences: Are they worth it?

Today we did peer conferencing in class with the narrative essays the students have been writing. Many times I've done peer conferences and realized after the lesson that it had absolutely no value and was a complete waste of time. The students are not teachers. Sometimes they don't give the best advice. Sometimes they give REALLY bad advice to each other. For example, after peer conferencing in a lesson last year, a student showed me her paper. She asked me if the word 'I'm' needed to be capitalized because her partner had told her that it wasn't. Every time she had used 'I'm', her partner had drawn a big slash through the capital I......head...

0 Teachers Pay Teachers Experiment

Many people have mentioned to me over the past couple weeks about the teacher who became a millionaire by selling lesson plans online.  When I heard about this, I immediately thought about Teachers Pay Teachers. I know about it from doing this blog and visiting other blogs where teachers link to their TPT accounts in order to sell products and the ideas they have on their blogs. I have never been one to actually pay money for lesson plans for worksheets, as I really prefer making my own stuff. I will occasionally download stuff from TPT when it's free or really inexpensive (only if I REALLY want it).    I figured I might as well...

0 Amazing Common Core Standard Checklist!

I can't really take ANY credit for this amazing idea I'm about to share....it was ALL my co-teacher's idea. I asked her permission to post it because I am obsessed with it. My co-teacher was wondering if there was a way to track how many times we had hit each standard in lessons, as well as pay attention to those we focus on more than others. We were looking for a simple document with all of the common core standards but couldn't find one. Then she came into my room with this outrageous creation: It's kind of hard to see but she cut out the list of standards for each category (reading literature, reading informational, writing, speaking,...

0 Common Core Lesson: Providing Evidence

There is a lot of emphasis on students providing textual evidence for answers in the new common core curriculum. This has been the meat of my curriculum and lessons for the last month. It's surprising to see the shift from prior knowledge and inference skill level questions now back to the basic find it in the text questions. Personally, I think the latter are easier for the students so I'll welcome the shift.  Along with the shift to text based question and answers is the shift in complexity of text. Students are being expected to read more complex and higher level texts. Included in the exemplars, and which I did end up teaching last...

0 Sticky Note Fever!

Wow...haven't put up one post since school started. Things are going great, but pretty busy and overwhelming. I've talked on my blog before about sticky notes and using them to assist with reading comprehension. I did it with my middle school students a couple of years ago, but did not continue with my high school students last year. It worked out really well for the middle school students and allowed for authentic and engaging conversation about the books we were reading, so I decided to start it up again. First off, I asked every student to bring in one pack of stickies. I think I'll have enough.....     During the first lesson...

0 Inspirational Quotes for the Classroom

Hope everyone is having a great first few days back. Just wanted to blog a little about how I have been decorating my classroom. I keep finding so many cool things on Pinterest and there's not enough room on my walls for everything I want to put up! Like I said this is the first year I've actually gotten to decorate for real. I like to use quotes from literature since I'm an English teacher. I've put up a few and I keep finding other ones I want to use! I also like to put up humorous things to show my students my fun side. Here are some that are in my classroom now: Harry Potter! Hanging on the door...haha Hunger Games! Some students...

0 Three best ideas from conference days....

 "Classroom teaching…. is perhaps the most complex, most challenging, and most demanding, subtle, nuanced, and frightening activity that our species has ever invented….The only time a physician could possibly encounter a situation of comparable complexity would be in the emergency room of a hospital during a natural disaster."-Lee Shulman This week has been a huge blur. Monday started with teacher orientation followed by conference days today and tomorrow. A lot of information is being given out to me in such a short amount of time...which makes for a very overwhelming week and sleepless nights. However I am discovering amazing...

1 How to set up your classroom to support the Common Core Standards

       I've been pretty busy last week and this week preparing for the first day of school and setting up my classroom. I've actually NEVER had my own classroom so this is all new to me. I've never had to deal with organizing, putting up posters, setting up different areas of the classroom, etc. I feel like I want to have everything perfect and set up before the first day but I know it's not going to happen. I have found a lot of great ideas on Pinterest, and I know I will find more as the year progresses. I just always had an idea in my mind that I would be so organized and have everything set in stone about how...

0 First Day of School Activities!

I can't believe there's only 2 1/2 weeks until I start school again! Summer went by in a flash, as usual. It seemed like it was even faster for me because I had a move and I will be starting my fourth English teaching job in 5 years! God forbid I am at a school for more than a year...and this is not by choice! Anyways, I have been brainstorming and planning for activities for the first day of school. I decided to do a variation of a couple of things I have done before. First idea: 'Toilet Paper' Ice Breaker Activity Many teachers (especially middle and high school teachers) will start out the class describing the syllabus and...

0 ABC Review

It's finals and Regents time! What ways are you helping your students review for their final? Believe it or not I've finished regular instruction in both of classes and started reviewing for the final. This was one fun way that I reviewed the literature we read in class this year. It is called ABC review.  Students were put into groups of 5. I gave them each a piece of large white butcher paper. The students write the entire alphabet down the left side of the paper (grouping XYZ together). Students had to think something for every letter of the alphabet from any of the pieces of literature we've read this year (characters, literary...

0 Greek Gods Facebook/Resume Project

Most of my students are on Facebook...or at least know what it is. It is important to me to find ways to connect to my students and find ways to motivate them. Technology is definitely something that is ingrained in students' lives....and mine! I'll be the first to admit I'm not capable of putting down my cell phone any more than my students can. Using technology is sometimes limited in my district, so I do what I can. This project was something I adapted from various ideas I've heard and seen on the internet and from other colleagues. This project began our unit on The Odyssey (a unit I initially dreaded). It turns out learning about the various...

0 A Time to Kill & To Kil a Mockingbird

Everyone loves Samuel L Jackson!  So one weekend while I was watching TV and A Time to Kill came on I couldn't help noticing the parallels between it and To Kill a Mockingbird.  A Time to Kill and To Kill a Mockingbird have similar themes/events:    Similar                                      Different A white lawyer defending a             ATTK is set in the (80's)? ...

0 Graphic Novels

I had a crazy idea back in December when I was out for surgery that I wanted to do something fun during Romeo and Juliet. Reading Romeo and Juliet would definitely present some challenges for my ninth graders, and I had planned on photocopying some acts from the Spark Notes graphic novel version. A graphic novel is basically like a comic strip format with character dialogue and pictures. It made it way easier for students to understand the story. To introduce Romeo and Juliet, I had students study different types of love. I then decided that they would create their own graphic novel based on one of the types of love- unrequited love- since Romeo...

0 My Vacation

I am dancing around the idea of changing the theme of my blog to more than just teaching. I'll start by sharing a day in the exciting life of a teacher on mid-winter vacation. It's Sunday night and I'm procrastinating making my lesson for tomorrow morning....grades might be due this week...I'll deal with that tomorrow. I didn't even so much as look at my school bag over vacation! Should I feel guilty? I kind of do- however- it's supposed to be vacation, right? Which means no work. I did however do some work in the kitchen. I started out my vacation by a lovely, three hour drive to Olean, which is always fun. And for those of you who think there's...