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Back-to-School Ready!

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As all teachers can relate, the last few days of my vacation were not spent daydreaming, basking in the sun, or sleeping in. Instead, I was knee-deep in preparing my classroom for opening day. And as many  teacher-nerds can attest, back-to-school prepping is not something I dread, but instead it is something I look forward to at the end of every summer. In this post, I would like to share how I set up my middle school classroom as well as some organizational and decor tips. If I were to describe my philosophy for decorating and organizing my classroom in just three words, I would say it is practical, functional, and affordable. While having a theme is cute and easy on the eye, it is not who I am. If you look at my classroom, you will notice that I do not follow a specific theme, I use all the colors of the rainbow, and there are no motifs: Having a color scheme is awesome, I mean, I use color schemes when decorating my home. However, when it comes to my classroom, I like to t
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Video Ant

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Finally, A Fun Way to Teach Annotation! Annotating is the act of a reader writing down his/her thoughts on a text during reading. Real-world readers and writers annotate all the time without skipping a beat. While skilled readers do not think much of this skill, for struggling or young readers annotating can seem like a science and unnatural. But I feel that as educators, if we truly want to raise our students' level of reading independency and comprehension, teaching annotation is not only necessary, but a must. There is just no way around it. But let me tell you, once your students understand the art of annotating, there will be no stopping them. After just a few lessons on annotation, I have seen my students from all different reading levels and interests raise their awareness of the text, critical thinking skills, thinking beyond the text, and their comprehension of the text. Teaching students to annotate and think actively about a text can be a challenge, and that is a
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10+1 Classroom Management Tips That Saved My Life

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Now that the 2015-16 school year has officially begun for the entire country, I thought it would be appropriate to discuss classroom management. The goal of classroom management is not just to create an organized classroom and stress-free days, but most importantly, effective classroom management aims for optimal student learning. Any seasoned teacher can readily agree classroom management goes hand-in-hand with student achievement. Although the content we teach is what we want students to walk away with, effective classroom management is the vehicle to help us reach the goal of student learning. As teachers, we all have an arsenal of classroom management tools that we just can't do without and aide in student learning. Throughout my eight years of teaching, I have experimented with numerous classroom management techniques, tips, and routines; some worked and some did not. Here is a list of the 10 that have survived my experiments and are now a part of my permanent teaching r
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Bloglovin'

a href="http://www.bloglovin.com/blog/14248653/?claim=yy98dmenx4x">Follow my blog with Bloglovin</a>
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Catalytic Questioning in The Classroom

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A few days ago I was reading the  Psychology Today  article, "Use Catalytic Questioning to Solve Significant Problems" when I was suddenly hit by a eureka-serendipity-like moment. I was not searching for any teaching strategies, but instead for enjoyment when I realized that the brainstorming strategy the article provided could be applied in the classroom. Although the article was written with the business world in mind, I could clearly see that this could be an innovative and groundbreaking strategy for students to use in the classroom. If you've ever experienced students having difficulty forming questions, brainstorming, being innovative, being original, creating new ideas, then this could be the strategy for you. The article's author, Hal Gregersen, relates how he has used a "systematic approach" to brainstorming for the business world that has consistently proven to be reliable and to help team members create and innovate solutions to problems. As
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Knowing Your Students' Learning Styles

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The first days of school are, hands down, the most important part of the school year; it is in the first days that teachers establish positive expectations, establish their classroom management, train students on classroom procedures, build a positive rapport with students, engage students in group-building exercises, etc. If we don't take  care of this foundation, our classroom structure can and will crumble right before our eyes. Before we can dive into the curriculum and carefully planned lessons, we need to spend some time taking care of the foundation and getting to know our learners; it seems painstaking and unimportant,  but trust me, it will be the best gift you will give yourself and your students all year. You can think of what you do on the first days of school as "the gift that keeps on giving," so to speak. One of the very first pieces of information I want to extract from my students is who they are as learners. Truth is, and perhaps too often, our stu
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Alternatives to The Book Report

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I think I can safely say that gone are the days when students wrote book reports as a response to reading activity and prove what they have read. Thankfully, the teaching profession has evolved and realized that if we are to  prepare students for real-world writing, they need to be immersed in more qualitative tasks. There are just so many fun, interactive, and meaningful alternatives to the  old-fashioned book report, that to be hard-headed and continue to assign book reports just does not make sense. This is why I have created this post; I want to share some authentic post-reading assessments as alternatives to the book report. Anyone can write a book report without having actually read a book. But to be able to engage in deeper and more authentic learning, students need to prove that they possess the analytical and inferential skills necessary to truly understand a book. Instead of being able to describe  the who, what, and where of a book, it is much more important to be ab
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