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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Well it took almost a full school year, but thanks to a professional development I went to, I found a review technique ALL of my 7th graders were on board with. I call it “True, False, Fix.” The PD person led us through a variety of strategies, and […]
Well it’s March, so that means it’s Women’s History Month. I felt extra pressure to acknowledge it the most effective and impactful way this year since I have middle school girls. I wanted this to mean something to them, not be something they roll their eyes about. There […]
My goal this semester is to try a new strategy or technique once a unit in all of my classes. It’s a lofty goal but thanks to my teacher friends (some of whom have shared their ideas at the bottom of this post) and Pinterest I think I’ll be […]
This review competition is NO PREP and can take as few as 5 minutes or as many as 15, it depends on if you ask follow-up questions and how in depth the students’ responses get. I start by writing the main topics we studied on the board. Each is […]
I learned about word clouds a few years ago, but for some reason didn’t use them until this year. It is such a quick and easy informal assessment (especially if it’s one of those days where you need to shake things up, or you finished sooner than you […]
