Tis the season to spread some holiday cheer through acts of kindness. We’ve come up with two mini kindness activities to use in the days leading up to Christmas and winter break. Please note that we do celebrate Christmas at…
We’re already getting into the Christmas spirit around here. In fact, there are Christmas carols playing as we write this! And we’re excited to tell you all about this fun Holiday Classroom Community Challenge (we’ll be starting it right after we…
Between the two of us, we have switched grade levels and schools seven times in our teaching careers! With each transition there is obviously a new curriculum to learn and new expectations for ourselves and our students. We’ve learned that…
We have used Socratic Seminars with our third graders all the way up through our twelfth graders to discuss short stories, poetry, and sets of chapters in a novel. While obviously the level of questions change, the setup remains pretty…
School’s out for summer! Well … not quite, just 19 days until the end of the school year though! We are definitely going to miss this year’s bunch of 5th graders, but I’m (Caitlin) excited to be moving back to…
Hello, Spring! And hello to one of the looonnnggesst months in the classroom. Why is it that March seems to drag so much (it’s almost as bad as January!)? Maybe it’s that long stretch between winter and spring break. Maybe…
Valentine’s Day has got to be one of the craziest days in the middle school classroom. It’s right up there with the day before Christmas break and the last day of school! Having spent several Valentine’s Days with middle schoolers…
Last year, we had so much fun checking off the items on our Christmas Bucket List for the Classroom that we decided to create one for Thanksgiving and extend the fun of the holiday season! Here’s what we plan to…
And then all of a sudden, it was November … We cannot believe how quickly this year has flown by! To think that it’s already our favorite month of the year 🙂 At this point, our students are used to…
Like any teacher, we both want to instill in our students a sense of pride in working hard to achieve goals that they set for themselves. What we found though was that in the day-to-day craziness of running a classroom,…
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
