One of my favorite (and quick) ways to get students to do some higher level thinking without realizing it is a game I call, “What Doesn’t Belong and Why?” I typically use this as a thematic or unit review so that students have the academic knowledge to flesh […]
Disclaimer: I know bell ringers and exit tickets aren’t for everyone. I started my teaching career not using them and now they are part of my middle school and on-level high school routine (for time reasons I don’t use them in APUSH). My first year teaching I wasn’t […]
My students love debating each other, LOVE it. However, they usually need practice at the start of the year defending their stance, especially if they’re middle schoolers or freshmen. Too many times I’ve heard, “because I said so,” or in an academic debate they don’t use the right […]
Have you heard of Symbaloo yet? I learned about it this past school year from our librarian and I love it!!! Symbaloo is a website that allows you to save and organize websites into clickable boxes. You can then email your students the link to the specific Symbaloo for […]
My classroom is a primary source heavy classroom. Sometimes we read through sources and analyze them together, sometimes my kids do it in small groups or pairs, at other times it’s an individual effort, and sometimes I even break the readings up and girls complete different tasks for […]
After years of thinking about it, this summer I finally bought a set of classroom white boards (my largest class is 22 this year so it wasn’t cost prohibitive). Instead of wasting paper and prep time on my end, this year a lot of my quick warm up […]
As teachers, no matter the content area, we frequently find ourselves with too much to teach and not enough time to teach it all sufficiently. That is definitely the case in my 6th grade World Geography class, so when we got to sub-Saharan Africa, I had to get creative […]
I don’t make my kids memorize dates for every single event. I do need them to know the Civil War happened before WW2, that JFK was a president after FDR, and for our curriculum that the XYZ Affair happened during Adams’ presidency, but I don’t expect them to […]
It seems like teachers, students, and schools have been getting hit by disaster after disaster lately. Thankfully, I am part of an amazing community at Teachers Pay Teachers and we are always coming up with ways to help out and support where we can. Tomorrow and Monday, 10 […]
So it’s a bit more than a month into the school year and too many of our middle schoolers (admittedly mostly 7th and 8th graders, not as many 6th graders) have already been saying: –this is too hard –why do we have to learn this –I can’t read/write […]
