Blog
5 Tips for Creating a Successful Co-Teaching Team
Two weeks ago I wrote about best practices for creating a successful team with your Paraprofessional. Don’t forget to check out the Paraprofessional Training Manual. This week I am going to focus on ways to create a successful C0-TEACHING team. Co-teaching...
Bubble Painting
Science is an area I sometimes struggle with in my classroom. So I’m always looking for new science activities I can do with my kids. I’m lucky to be spending my summer with a girl who loves science experiments. We have been trying all kinds of activities...
Mind the Gap: How to Stretch Learning Over Summer Break
With the dog days of summer settling in, and school starting up soon for some districts across the country, it is time to get our students back into learning gear.
No Stress Fine-Motor Support
There is something about watching an eight-year-old struggle to use a pair of scissors that really gets to me. It takes everything in me not to grab those little kiddie scissors out of his hand, cut the shapes out for him, glue everything down, write his name myself...
5 Tips for Making a Successful Team with your Paraprofessionals!
Let’s be honest, Preschool paraprofessionals are LIFESAVERS. If you are a general or special education preschool teacher, you might recall the dreaded feeling when you find out your paraprofessional is absent for the day. Really, I don’t think we could...
Vehicle File Folder Activities
Many of my students had a fun filled month of vehicle activities. Just to recap my students and I read the adapted book “I Spy Vehicles” and completed a vehicle identification worksheet. Then we read “Toot Toot Beep Beep” and made puff paint...
Pre-k Portraits
We create a lot of self portraits throughout the year. We start the year with the kids looking in a mirror and drawing how they see themselves. As the year goes on we create the portraits in other ways. This is one of my favorite self portrait activities to do with my...
Interactive Notebooks
As a college history major, I LOVED history and when I started teaching elementary school one of the things I was most excited about was teaching Social Studies.So I was pretty disappointed when I realized a few things that happen in many elementary schools. I...
Joyful and Illiterate? – Try Anxious and Overworked Kindergarteners
Many times I worked so hard with kindergarteners to get them to read and they could care less about letters and words. Now, they loved story time and reading a story is much more than just reading words. These students wanted to read the pictures, ask questions, tell me about something they noticed, etc. All of these observations are important pre-reading skills. However, the act of finding meaning in words was of no interest to them. And that is OK.
