Common Core Standard 7 for Reading presents teachers with many possibilities for mixing all kinds of art forms with literature.  Music, photography, painting, sculpture, and many other media are easily brought into the classroom today because of the internet…the important thing is to use these resources heuristically. 7. Analyze the representation ...

Looking at CCS standard for reading #5, I am encouraged to see critical thinking required of our students.  It is important to ensure that skills like problem solving, analyzing, and evaluating are at the core of our reading, writing, and speaking skills curricula.  It is also essential that we keep in mind the goal of generating independent, ...

This week we look at the last of three standards under “Key Ideas and Details” in the “Reading” section of the Common Core: Standard 3:  Analyze how complex characters (e.g., those with multiple or conflicting motivations) develop over the course of a text, interact with other characters, and advance the plot or develop the theme. For students to ...

As the school year winds down, you might be thinking about what new or different books you hope to use in the fall.  If you are, I encourage you to check out Open Educational Resources (OER) textbooks.  OER or “Open Source” textbooks are digital, often customizable, textbooks published and available on the web.  Many of them are quite ...

Ok, so the days are finally getting longer here in New England and the end of the school year is within sight…but I still feel like there simply aren’t enough hours in the day to get everything done and the students are growing restless by the day.  So, as usual, I’ve been digging about on the web, looking for resources to keep my students busy ...

Last week I wrote a post about using online comic creator applications to create comic strips based on scenes from Homer’s Odyssey.  Today I’ve published a lesson plan based on this idea.  This plan explores Epic / Homeric Similes, vivid word choices, and tone in the Odyssey based on Common Core Standards for Literature–Craft and Structure.  I ...

When recently looking for electronic resources to add to my short story unit, I came across LearnOutLoud.com where hundreds of recorded works are available free for download.  Learn Out Loud doesn’t just have audio recordings of books and stories (though there are plenty of those); they also have podcasts and videos. Some of the resources cost ...

I hope you will join me in visiting Links for Educators. It is the newest searchable databse of websites directly related to education and teaching. It contains a searchable database so you can find links relevant to your discipline and you can even rate the websites so you know what others have found to be helpful. I hope you will visit it and ...

Last night as I was reading a book about creating quality lessons, I had a teacher moment. I envisioned myself teaching a literature lesson. We were having a whole class discussion about a book and I was trying to pull examples of themes, found in the book, from my students. I imagined asking one of my students to recall what a theme is and share ...

Another great idea came from this blogger. To help first graders get in the reading mode, she is taking photocopies of the covers of all the books she reads to them as a group (and has multiple copies of each book in the class library) and hanging the pictures up so that the kids can identify which book it was that they remember and want to try to ...