So I haven’t totally bought into the idea of flexible seating quite yet … I seem to see a lot of teachers struggle with various aspects of it (discipline, students being too chatty, lack of respect for furniture, and admins…
The one pager assignment has been around the teacher blogosphere for a while now. It seems like everyone uses them all the time! And I won’t lie, I’ve definitely used the one pager with my students – most recently as…
This classroom management strategy for your middle school classroom is incredibly simple. The goal is to reach 15:00 by the end of each marking period (you could even utilize this strategy weekly and have students try to reach 1:00 or…
We’ve made it! We’re at the end of our 4-part series where we’re walking you through 4 easy steps to creating an awesome short story unit for your middle school students! If you missed the previous posts you can read…
We’ve into part 3 now of how to create a short story unit for your middle school students – and an awesome unit at that! If you missed Parts 1 and 2 where we talked all about the hook and…
Welcome back to our 4-part series where we’re walking you through 4 easy steps to creating an awesome short story unit! If you missed Part 1 where we talked all about the hook, you can read it here. This 4-part…
Welcome to our 4-part series that will teach you how to create a short story unit using 4 easy steps! Using the framework we’re about to share is going to make this an incredibly easy and streamlined process for you…
After 10+ years teaching writing, you can bet we’ve made plenty of mistakes! We want to share with you some of these, but we’re also going to share strategies that you can use to easily fix them. These tactics took…
The way we begin our mornings really sets a tone for the rest of the day. During my first few years of teaching, I didn’t realize how truly important those first 5 minutes of class were. I was always taught to…
One of my favorite things to do before we begin a novel is have students make predictions about what the text will be about. I do this for a few reasons. One, it’s fun! Two, it gets them invested in…
All of those crazy middle school classroom decor ideas you see all over Pinterest? Well they don’t have to be a time-consuming and expensive endeavor! Just because Pinterest and Instagram have you thinking that everyone else has beautiful, HGTV-worthy classrooms, let me tell…
Hi there! We're two middle school ELA teachers with a mission to share ideas, tips, and tricks for effectively teaching reading and writing in the secondary classroom. We're so happy you stopped by!
Caitlin + Jessica
