Browsing Tag
This year for Teacher Appreciation week, we here at ELA Matters want to THANK YOU for your commitment to your students. We are gifting to you several ideas and freebies throughout this post to help you finish the year strong!
Test Prep can be dry – why not make it a game with board game creation?
We’ve all had this experience: You hand your students a copy of the text and invite them to “annotate the text.” You’re expecting to see margins filled with student writing – making their thinking visible to both you and them. Instead, you see clean crisp margins. Not a written comment in sight. If you’re lucky, …
Writing as a response to reading benefits students in several ways. It allows them to reflect on the ideas presented in text, become familiar with patterns in language, and share opinions about what they’ve read. When I first introduced reading response journals, it was out of a need to replace the traditional reading log and …
Summaries are something every teacher does year after year to introduce and then to reinforce the skill. After all, it is a backbone writing skill that applies to all subjects, not just ELA. But summary writing is difficult for students… and teachers too! My way around these difficulties is to use a mixture of activities …
When I taught Grade 6 French Immersion, I started using inquiry-based learning in my classroom towards the end of the school year. My goal was for my students to apply all the comprehension strategies they had learned. This positive experience, both for me and them, convinced me even more of its benefits. If you wish …
Book clubs are my go-to strategy for engaging students in authentic conversations about reading. It has been my saving grace this year as students have struggled to return to the classroom. Why do I love book clubs so much? Book clubs help put students in the driver seat of their own learning! I have found …
Getting ready to return for the new school year? Or maybe you’ve already settled into a few days or weeks? Whatever the case may be some of our ELA MATTERS contributors have some tried-and-true advice to share to help you. Take a read through for some simple helpful advice whether you are a new or …
I (Lesa from SmithTeaches9to12) always joke that teachers are lucky to have at least two new year ‘celebrations’ in which they can make a fresh start – a regular new year for the change in calendar year and back to school! And to make a fresh start there is nothing better to me than making …
We all know that incorporating writing into our middle school or high school English Language Arts classrooms can sometimes be difficult to do every day. There is always a plethora of material to cover and writing every single day doesn’t always make the cut, but it should. Writing daily will not only improve students’ writing, …
