What Should Teachers Know?!   It's not always easy picking the right information out when your planning the next semester or school year! This year, change that. Check out this great guide that will help address middle and high school classroom teachers, administrators, and parents immediate need for basic information about how to build ...

  Check out this brochure for great reading tips! Its full of ways to make the most of that short time with your student. These eleven tips in both English and Spanish will make your time so much more valuable! To order your FREE publication now, go to http://www.edpubs.ed.gov/Product_Detail.aspx!!!    

One of my criticisms of NCLB is that it causes too many schools to focus all of their attention on the bottom 25% of a school’s population while ignoring the middle- and upper-level students. Some of the effects of this focus in my school are: fewer upper-level course choices in order to create more lower-level courses, larger [...]

Two novels I taught this year were To Kill A Mockingbird and A Gathering of Old Men. Prior to and during reading these novels, I had the kids look at some songs, poems, and historical context. Here are a few of my favorite things concerning the race relations in the novels. Prior to reading To Kill [...]

I purchased some movie units from Michael Vetrie, an alternative high school teacher in Sun Valley, CA, and I’m going to try one tomorrow. I will show The Matrix in half-hour segments, so the students can do the following: compose a double-entry journal, study the film using literary terms, analyze critical quotations in the novel plot how ...

We’ve finished learning the whole alphabet, and some of my little friends actually know the whole damn thing, so we’ve been celebrating our accomplishments with some spirited readings of Chicka Chicka Boom Boom.  On Monday we made a mural, and each child did his or her own little chicka tree, using templates I found here. Now [...]

Now that we’re in the home stretch, our theme is “Ready for Kindergarten,” and all the books on our shelf are about kindergarten and school.  Z. commented that some of them looked familiar, and I told her that we’d had a bunch of them out at the start of the year.  I was impressed, but [...]

Well, duh, yes of course it does.  But when I saw that that was the title of an op-ed piece in the LA Times, explaining why Reading First isn’t working, I rolled my eyes and figured it would be more moaning about how parents aren’t doing their jobs, so teachers can’t do theirs.  (I’ve heard [...]

While I assess diction analysis papers, personal essay, and literary analysis essays this week in the evening, I have scheduled enrichment films for my students. Here they are: Reading A Gathering of Old Men Malcolm X Separate But Equal Mississippi Burning Reading Frankenstein Edward Scissorhands Frankenstein Reading The Iliad Troy 300 Any ...

New Connecticut teachers are going to have to take a test to prove that they know enough about teaching reading.  I’ve been following this with interest, and have read several angry comments from CT teachers.  I’m for it, and would have no problem taking this test if I lived in CT.  Teaching reading is rocket science [...]