Teaching and learning in grades 4-8

Our 2018 Winter Book Review Festival

Looking for books that might inspire or help you grow as an educator? Perhaps you’ll find one in this winter reading collection, chosen from among our 2017 MiddleWeb book reviews. We’ve included content area titles, teaching strategies, leadership tips, and more.

How We Learned to Love Writing Together

This story by Ruth Ayres, from her new book Enticing Hard-to-Reach Writers, is a holiday gift to novice educators everywhere and to any teachers still wondering whether their students can ever learn to love writing so much they stop turning in incomplete assignments.

10 Tweaks That Can Deepen Math Tasks

So often we miss opportunities to deepen our students’ thinking about mathematics that would require just a few moments of our teacher time. Take a minute to look at these 10 simple strategies from Jerry Burkhart that transform formulaic math problems into explorations.

6 Ways to Take the Joy Out of Reading

We know adolescents read far less than younger children. Classroom practices often don’t help, writes ELA teacher Cheryl Mizerny. By discarding strict regimes, she says, educators can increase the love of reading among tweens and teens and put the joy back into books.

Differentiated Fiction and Nonfiction Lessons

This resource-rich book of comprehensive lessons is great for teachers who want to challenge 4th and 5th graders or for middle school educators looking for a way to bridge the gap from where students are to where they need to be, says ELA teacher Erin Corrigan-Smith.

Kids Deserve It! Pushing Teaching Boundaries

Todd Nesloney and Adam Welcome offer educators ways to rethink teaching, model risk taking for students, show students they are valued, push the boundaries that hold teachers back, take care of themselves, and develop leadership at a high level, writes Laura Von Staden.

Avoiding the Pitfalls of Student Group Work

How do your students react when you ask them to work together in groups? Cheers or groans? Teacherpreneur and author Patrice Palmer shares strategies to plan ahead and avoid group project pitfalls and to help students see the benefits of working with each other.