Wrapping Up the School Year

You can do this one in conjunction with packing up the classroom library: each child chooses a favorite book and tries to convince classmates to read it over the summer. There are…
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Group Activity Idea: Encore!

Here’s a Morning Meeting activity idea from 80 Morning Meeting Ideas for Grades 3–6, by Carol Davis: Encore! Students team up to connect vocabulary words with favorite songs. How to Read More…
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Group Activity Idea: Lost Tooth Poem

Here’s a Morning Meeting activity idea from 80 Morning Meeting Ideas for Grades K–2, by Susan Lattanzi Roser: Lost Tooth Poem Children will relate to this poem about a missing Read More…
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Sharing Idea: Who Remembers My Favorite Book?

Playing a fun remembering game builds on children's listening and memory skills.
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Sharing Idea: My Favorite Season . . . and Here’s Why!

Here’s a Morning Meeting sharing idea from 80 Morning Meeting Ideas for Grades K–2, by Susan Lattanzi Roser: My Favorite Season . . . and Here’s Why! Challenges students to Read More…
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Greeting Idea: Secret Handshake

Here’s a Morning Meeting greeting idea from 80 Morning Meeting Ideas for Grades 3–6, by Carol Davis: Secret Handshake Greeting Creating secret handshakes taps students’ creativity and builds community. How Read More…
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Greeting Idea: Backward Day Handshake

Here’s a Morning Meeting greeting idea from 80 Morning Meeting Ideas for Grades K–2, by Susan Lattanzi Roser: Backward Day Handshake Greeting Students pass along a friendly handshake, but say Read More…
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Bringing Rules to Life

Do you think that without looking, your students could name your classroom's rules? Most teachers establish classroom rules at the beginning of the year, and many devote time to modeling and practicing…
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Try This: Y-Charts for Revisiting Rules

Are you looking for a strategy to help your students navigate particularly tricky times of day, such as transitions, recess, lunch, or dismissal time? Try making a "looks like/sounds like" chart (often…
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Questioning Your Assumptions

Winter break can provide teachers a bit of time and space to reflect on how the school year has gone so far, and to decide what adjustments to make in Read More…
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Need a New Mattress?

At this time of year, people who work in schools often start feeling a bit frayed. Now that the school year is well underway, the "honeymoon period" of the first weeks is…
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Teaching Future Scientists

 "Young engineers, it looks as if you have mastered skyscrapers. Now you are ready for the challenge of building a bridge!" said the teacher to a small group of children in a…
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Teaching Children How to Converse

These days, curriculum often recommends using "partner chats," "turn-and-talk," and other one-on-one conversation strategies to help students reflect on and deepen their learning. Although it may seem like a simple thing, chatting…
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How We Want Our School to Be

Several years ago, teachers at Ironia Elementary, a suburban New Jersey school with 600 students in kindergarten through fifth grade, began working with their students each September to create classroom rules—simple but…
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Invisible Children

Are there invisible children at your school? A recent series of comments on the Responsive Classroom Facebook page got me thinking again about how many children go through their school days feeling…
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Books for Guided Discovery: Crayons

Use a book to kick off a Guided Discovery lesson or to reinforce learning from it. A great read-aloud can open children’s minds to the magic and possibilities of the Read More…
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First Day Memories

I never loved the first day of school. My teaching depended so much upon knowing my students, and until I got to know them, I never felt entirely comfortable.Having said that, I do…
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Joplin Schools Open On Time

One night this week the national news included two snippets related to our country’s schoolchildren: one I found very discouraging and the other really heartening. The discouraging news was that one in…
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On the First Day, Less Is More

When I started teaching, I always planned way too much for the first days of school. It took me a while to learn to make the first day of school a comfortable,…
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Mudge

How can you create a powerful sense of community in your classroom? With the leisure of summer, we can ponder questions like this and plan ahead for next year.
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What Could Be

As teachers of young children, we do not always get to see our hopes for our students fulfilled. We have to trust that we and their future teachers will make a difference,…
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Decluttering Starts Now!

How much of the stuff that’s cluttering your classroom could be gone before school starts up again? Teachers keep all kinds of stuff we never use. Why do we keep these things?…
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Celebrating Friendship

Take time at the end of the school year to help children reflect on how they have worked to get to know each other, efforts they have made to be kind, and…
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Reflecting on Hopes and Goals

As the school year winds down, how will your students reflect on the hopes, dreams, and goals they set for this year? Many books could inspire this sort of reflection, including those…
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Read-Alouds for Remembering

How has your class grown this year? What acts of kindness have they done for each other? What have they learned? What do you hope they will remember? Children's books can be…
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Positive Reinforcement

Last week I took part in a panel discussion about the pros and cons of positive reinforcement on Rae Pica’s online radio show. Her producers asked me to join because they read…
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Class Clown

Question: I am a parent of a very bright second grader. He reads at roughly a fourth-fifth grade level and has very strong math skills. The problem is he seems Read More…
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