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 […]
Many of my Social Studies teacher friends have come together to support schools devastated by Hurricane Harvey. We will be donating our TpT store earnings from September 4th directly to schools, teachers, classrooms, and therefore to students affected by this natural disaster. Find out more in this blog post […]
There are dozens of ways teachers can address students who finish their classwork early. Over the years I’ve had a binder with small academic tasks (including some from here) for kids to choose which they wanted to complete, I’ve given them time to study for tests or to get […]
Back to school shopping is here (arguably one of my favorite times of the year) so I asked some secondary teacher friends what their school supply “must haves” are and they had some really awesome responses. Here are 10 school supplies some secondary teachers can’t wait to get […]
As a history teacher, images from the past are vital to my classes every single day. Kids need to see the past and make connections to it to fully understand, and hopefully appreciate, it. I almost always use images (whether real or political cartoons) to introduce and review […]
I recently had my students make their last bulletin board of the year. I envisioned it turning out one way, but it morphed into something much more and I was blown away by their conversations about it. I had it say, “One Word Reflections,” and in one word my […]
