Just when I needed some inspiration for this week’s vocabulary activity, my amazing new friend Becky Amaral, who teaches sixth and seventh grade English at The Country...
I just love Libba Bray’s insightful analysis, quirky characters and her ability to write such diverse yet equally fantastic books! She was incredibly gracious to allow me...
I particularly like the end of February and it has everything to do with Read Across America Day and the beginning of National Reading Month (March 1)! With these two...
In honor of President’s Day earlier this week, I’d like to say that I have interviewed President Obama. Unfortunately, he is a bit hard to reach, but I do have three awesome...
As promised, I mused over vocabulary activities involving awards after receiving approbation as a Best Teacher Blogger from We Are Teachers two weeks ago. The result: I...
Matt de la Peña comes from humble beginnings and has achieved a modicum of success that would make many authors a bit supercilious, but he remains nonchalant and humble.
So often, we think that students will never voluntarily expand their vocabulary. We think it is only through our constant inundation of vocabulary in the classroom that they...
My students love music-they walk in to class with earphones in or t-shirts blazoned with their favorite bands. One day last week, I was reviewing vocabulary definitions at...
Yesterday I realized I could tweak one of my favorite games to play in college for classroom vocabulary instruction! With my Banned Words/Guess that Word vocabulary game,...
Since the beginning of the year, I have been showing my students the Vocab Gal videos where I interview young adult authors about their favorite words and the reasons they...
I’d like to think that words make the man, rather than clothes (I also want to say human rather than just man). When it came to making my own business cards a few years ago,...
My students are obsessing over James Dashner right now. If one of them picks up The Maze Runner, as soon as they finish, they must grab the sequel right then and there and...