Teacher Created Materials

A teacher’s language choice plays an important role in developing student-to-student discourse.  To begin, it is important to think about the questions that we ask in our math lessons. Teachers can engage students in discourse by posing genuine questions to encourage discussion and debate, and to require students to attend to the mathematics at hand while explaining and justifying their thinking. A question is genuine when the teacher does not know the answer to them and is sincerely looking to

In honor of National Poetry Month, here is an excerpt from Kwame Alexander’s popular book The Write Thing, which showcases how to use poetry in Writing Workshop to motivate and engage all students through the writing process. In the book, Kwame stresses the importance of sharing your published work.

Helping our students learn to write across the curriculum and across genres is a powerful way to provide lifelong skills. We want to give them confidence and the desire to write. But making the transformation from idea to composition can be intimidating to many students. So how can we make writing a fun learning experience? Powerful teaching strategies are the answer! Here are three things you can try tomorrow.

How many times have you, as a teacher, heard a phrase from your students such as “I need the things, to do the stuff.” The correlation between student vocabulary knowledge and academic achievement is well documented, and all teachers focus on teaching their students the academic vocabulary representative of the grade level and content areas they teach. However, it can be a challenge to get students to incorporate that vocabulary into their own speech and writing. Here are three simple ways to he

There’s a book, isn’t there, that you loved as a child? Just thinking about it brings back a flood of memories. Either the story itself delighted you, or the memory of reading it with someone you love sealed that book in your heart forever. Either way, the book sparked something in you‚ and the fire that was lit is a love of reading that you carry with you to this day. Every child deserves that spark, don’t they? The great news is that there is a book like that for every reader. One that will st

There are literally millions of texts that are there for the reading, right at your fingertips. Not so with all other forms of art! To see the Mona Lisa, you must travel to Paris and pay the entry fee into the Louvre. To see the Taj Mahal, you must make your way to India, pay your entrance, and step only where allowed to tread. And whether Taylor Swift, Beyoncé, or The Wiggles, that concert is going to cost you. But to read the works of the masters through time and the present day? Nothing.