Articles

The walls of the classroom look emptier than they looked a month ago and a few remnants of the presence of students remain: a pencil here or a sticky note there containing a past thought. As the last student leaves the room in which you’ve built a community, many emotions…

Although we hope that our students’ learning won’t stop just because school does, it’s good to help them reach a sense of closure during the last few weeks of the year. Good endings leave students with feelings of pride in their growth, a strong sense of themselves as capable learners,…

On Move-Up Day, a rite of passage for the children at my school, I tend to feel a bit wistful as the second graders I've been teaching head off to meet their new teacher, and I welcome next year's class. Although the first graders are always eager to meet me,…

Summer camp was a big part of my childhood. When I think back to my experiences at sleep-away camp, I remember a clear line between the camp with an atmosphere of safety and kindness and the camp with an atmosphere of recklessness and cruelty. At the first camp, the counselors…

Ideas from Responsive Classroom consultants Lynn Majewski, Babs Freeman-Loftis, and Tina Valentine  Lynn Majewski: 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 a variety of ways…

By mid-July, my two children had finally settled into summer. I knew when I got downstairs one morning and saw my nine-year-old son, Ethan, coming through the back door in his bathrobe with raspberries and blueberries he'd picked from the backyard. We went back out and spent some time in…

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? Lots of reasons: Scarcity of resources can turn us into hoarders. Or we engage in “someday” thinking, as…

We asked four Responsive Classroom consultants, "What's one great resource for teachers as they look ahead to the next school year?" Here are their responses: Mark Emmons said, "The Well-Balanced Teacher, by Mike Anderson, is a quick read and has many helpful tips for teachers. It shows teachers how to…

I’d just read Tina Valentine’s post called “Will Your Students Keep Learning This Summer?” when I happened on another article on the same topic in the current International Reading Association newsletter. “Stopping Summer Slide” cites research conducted by Anne McGill-Franzen,  Richard Allington, and colleagues at the University of Tennessee. They…

Did you know that two-thirds of the achievement gap in reading can be related directly to unequal summer learning opportunities? Even though I've seen firsthand how students can lose ground in their learning over the summer, that statistic shocked me. It's cited in the June edition of The Whole Child…

For students, teachers, and parents alike, few events bring more hope and nervousness than the start of a new school year. As the summer winds down, many teachers begin to have conflicting feelings about the year ahead. We’re at once curious about our new students and daunted by the challenge…