Tag Archives: Teachers

Letter To Your Teacher

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Teachers are responsible for so many aspects of a student’s life- not just the academics. It’s helpful to give students an opportunity periodically to tell you whatever is on their mind. However, some students will tell you they don’t have anything to say. So here’s my solution:

To get this poster, right click on it and select “save image as.”  Then you can save it to your computer and
resize it before you print it. I printed mine on a regular 8.5″ x 11″ sheet of card stalk.

I print this page up at the beginning of the year (to save time writing up the prompt multiple times), and put it on the board about 4 times a year as an in-class writing assignment. One year, I had a particularly social group of 6th grade girls and there always seemed to be some dramatic catastrophe going on between them {sigh}. I chose to do this writing assignment during one particularly dramatic episode and it turned out to be very helpful for me as their teacher to hear about what’s going on without “prying into their lives.”

Halloween Persuasive Writing Prompts

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Halloween Persuasive Writing
  1. Should students be allowed to celebrate Halloween at school? Why or Why not?
  2. Should parents get to eat candy their kids bring home from Trick-or-Treating? Why or Why not?
  3. At what age should kids stop Trick-or-Treating? Why?
  4. What’s the best part (or parts) or Halloween? Why?
  5. What’s the coolest Halloween costume anyone could ever be? Why?
Requirements:
  •  hand written, skip lines
  • 5 paragraphs: introduction, 3 body paragraphs with at least 5 sentences each, conclusion
  • 3 reasons (each paragraph will be a different reason)
Turn In:
  •  Graphic organizer
  • Rough draft
  • Final draft in pen
  • Submission sheet
  • Picture (optional)

Compare/Contrast Essay Organizer

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Compare and contrast essays are one of the most common writing assignments on standardized tests. I found it helpful to have an organizer for my students. Having specific questions that prompt students about what to write in each part was especially helpful for my ESL kids. Here’s the one I used for our social studies unit on world religions (research and compare/contrast 2 world religions):

General vs Specific

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Some of my students struggled with the concept of general vs. specific. After a mini-lesson on the difference (including common vs. proper nouns), we used this worksheet to practice. NOTE: The example is not done for you. This is for you to use in your mini-lesson and transition to independent/partner practice. Enjoy!

To get this worksheet, right click on it and select “save image as”. After you’ve saved it to 
your computer, you can resize it before you print it. It’s not a big worksheet, so you could
print it 2 on a page.

Finding Parts of Speech in Reading Books

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Here’s a really simple (and quick) worksheet for kids to use during their independent reading time or as a homework assignment to help reinforce parts of speech. Although it may seem repetitive (identifying 15 of the same part of speech), this is what some students need to catch on to the idea. For the students who already understand parts of speech, it’s PAINLESS and can be accomplished in a matter of minutes.


Click here to download the worksheets:

Verbs in My Reading Book worksheet
Nouns in My Reading Book worksheet
Adjectives in My Reading Book worksheet
Prepositions in My Reading Book worksheet

*You can modify these worksheets on Microsoft Word so they focus on other grammar concepts your class may struggle with.

End of the Year Writing: Yearbook

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So many of the important assessments students face nowadays require competent writing. I used the end of the year as a chance to reinforce basic paragraph construction with this yearbook. I created pages on Microsoft Word (feel free to change the pages or add your own) that focused on specific aspects of our school year. For example, we had a grade-level Olympics in conjunction with our study of ancient civilizations, so I included a page that focused on this fun event. This was a great way to help students review the things they’d learned during the year. This would be very easy to modify for younger grades.

As a class, we made a checklist of the tasks required to complete the yearbook (each student copied down the list). Each student was required to write a rough draft on regular notebook paper, and have a peer edit it before they could go on to the final draft. Once the checklists were made, the students were free to work on whatever page they wanted. Each student completed the entire list, but could choose which page to work on each time we started working. This entire project took my 6th graders about 2.5 – 3 weeks to complete (45 min- 1 hour a day). One parent had taken pictures of school events (like track & field day and our Shakespeare play) and generously printed some of them for us. Each student ended up with 2-3 pictures from the year to glue into their book. I suppose you could encourage students to bring in a picture or two to glue in if they wanted. The students especially enjoyed signing each others’ yearbooks once they were all completed (we added a few blank pages at the end for autographs and messages).

Here are the Word files if you want to download them:
Yearbook Cover
Shakespeare Play page
Mathematics page
Medieval Day page
Guided reading page
Olympics page
Favorite Things page
Project Requirements
Writing page
Science page
Teachers page
Lunch & Recess page
Friends page

*When I uploaded these files, my cute fonts, didn’t get uploaded, so you might want to change them on your own computer to make them more interesting.

2022 Note: I’ve had some people message me that some of the pages aren’t downloading from Google Drive where they’re uploaded. I’m sorry, and I’ll do my best to figure out the issue.

What are some of your favorite end of the year projects/activities?

Words Their Way- New Teacher Survival Outline

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When I first started teaching, I was very overwhelmed with all the word study programs I was expected to run. Each week, we had 30 spelling words, 10 root-based vocab words and the Words Their Way program. Like all new teachers, I had to start small with each program to be able to do them all at once. So I made this small, very simple outline to get me started. 

Words Their Way: WEEK OUTLINE
Monday– introduce
cut, name on chips
lay & say
sort
write down sort
Tuesday– lay & say
sort
write down sort
game: memory
Wednesday– lay & say
Sort
game: zoom around (each has 7, play same category until you can’t)
Thursday– lay & say
Sort
Game: Slap Jack (war)
Friday– lay & say
Sort as a review
Test (choose a few words and they must sort them by category as they spell them)
MIX UP GAMES AS DESIRED.


Reviewing Punctuation… The Fun Way

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From a 2nd grade teacher friend:

We are studying statements, commands, exclamations, and questions.  I say a sentence.  If it is a question they stand up and curve their arm over their head like a question mark.  If it is a statement, they put their head on their desk like a period.  If it is an exclamation they stand up straight with both hands over their head like an exclamation mark.  My kids loved it!