Daily Starters

Scholastic has daily starters available - for free - at http://www.scholastic.com/teachers/. Each one has a teachable moment (usually a day in history type thing), a brief writing prompt, and a vocabulary activity. For example, the starter for Sept. 24th reads:


Teachable Moment

Basketball was invented by James Naismith, who taught physical education at the YMCA in Springfield, Massachussetts. During the cold winter of 1891, Naismith had to come up with an exercise his students could perform indoors because it was too cold to go outside. And so he came up with the game of basketball!

My Morning Journal
Can you imagine inventing your own sport? Tell how the game would be played and what equipment would be needed.

Word of the Day
It’s National Punctuation Day!

!?”[*—!

Do you think the lowly comma is irrelevant? Think again. A comma can save a life! For example, read the two sentences below. How does the meaning change in each? Why did it change?

1. Let's eat Grandma!
2. Let's eat, Grandma!

irrelevant  [ih-rel-uh-vuhnt] adjective

•not relevant; not related to the matter at hand

Synonyms: unimportant, beside the point, trivial

Write a sentence for irrelevant. Be sure to punctuate it correctly.

Dr. B's Common Core Websites

Here are the websites Dr. B suggested we use for Common Core: 

http://schools.nyc.gov/Academics/CommonCoreLibrary

State Department of Education

North Carolina  www.dpi.state.nc.us/

New York:

www.nysed.gov/  Using teaching units from www.commoncore.org and will be posting math units

Massachusetts  www.doe.mass.edu/

Missouri  dese.mo.gov/

Nevada  www.doe.nv.gov/

Evidentiary Statements

Click here for the excellent poster Ms. T sent out with starters for evidentiary statements. This is a great tool to get our students ready for TCAP writing!

Exit Ticket Templates

Exit tickets are an awesome way to wrap up a lesson! Click here for templates of 10 different exit tickets.

Bulletin Board: Genre

Teaching genre? Here is a board Ms. Burtram created for just that topic! This would be a great board to have a few of your kids reproduce during R and E.

Bulletin Board: Bee a Good Reader

Here is a fun bulletin board for keeping track of accomplishments. We use this board to celebrate when a student has completed a Versatile book. Each flower represents a specific book. When a student has successfully completed each exercise in a specific book, his/her bee goes up next to that flower. This would work for any list of accomplishments you had - like, for example, your study island assignments.

Bulletin Board: Thinking Strategies Good Readers Use

This would be a fabulous board to let some of your kids work on during R and E - they are learning reading strategies (and hopefully thinking about them) as they are creating a great reminder for all of your students. If I have visited your class during DEAR, this board was created using the same template as the handouts I gave your students. If you would like your own copies of that handout, and some other great reading posters/bookmarks/etc. click here.