Middle schools and their students are special. By design 6-8 grade schools are intended to be communities, organized in houses or teams as the kids are exploring themselves and their world. All this helps in the leap to online school, says teacher Laurie Lichtenstein.
Leading Learning for ELL Students is a helpful resource for all school and district leaders looking to evaluate and strengthen their EL services. ESOL educator Jordan Walker-Reyes explains how EL teachers can also use the book to improve their programs.
Mary Tedrow shows how to cultivate students’ individual relationships with writing using a low stakes approach called a Daybook – a safe, authentic space for students to write and think that can feed into other disciplines and writing genres. Ariel Sacks calls it her “new top resource.”
It’s amazing to think – with all the digital tools we have at our disposal – that genuine communication is more difficult today than ever before. Yet that’s our reality, says middle grades teacher Jeremy Hyler, at school and at home, with students, parents and colleagues.
Math teacher Robert Kaplinsky wanted his students debating about the best way to solve a problem, using strategic thinking and not just the formula. He also wanted to know when students had misconceptions so he could reshape his lessons. His solution? Open Middle Math.
Spring arrives a day early this year, and testing season won’t be far behind. No matter a teacher’s opinion of standardized testing, most will be engulfed in the annual ritual soon. Curtis Chandler distills strategies to help teachers and students cope successfully.
Understanding concept words like ‘innovative’ can help students to make sense of complex sources. Britany Harris and Sunday Cummins share a four-step process to introduce a few new vocabulary words before reading an information text and then focus on them as kids read, talk and write.
Are students who increasingly communicate through bits of digital text missing the chance to develop live conversation skills? In her middle grades classroom, Nancy Costanzo has crafted strategies to help kids both deepen their understanding and become skilled conversationalists.
I Will Screw This Up / YA Reviews
by Dina Strasser · Published 02/19/2020 · Last modified 09/03/2020
Acknowledging that as a white woman of privilege she cannot fully experience the depth of meaning in Tomi Adeyemi’s Children of Blood and Bone, ELA teacher Dina Strasser shares four takeaways from her limited perspective as an educator and lover of speculative Young Adult fiction.
Help middle graders connect past and present using the easy-to-understand lessons in Hands-On Archaeology. Teacher educator Linda Biondi says the authors show us how giving kids opportunities to ‘dig’ in and out of class can build team skills and cross-curricular learning.
