Speaking and listening are often de-emphasized in schools due to the pressure on teachers to focus on reading and writing. The fourth through eighth grade la...

It’s no secret that inspiring kids to read is much easier than inspiring them to write. Case in point: I begin every school year with a quick survey: I ask t...

Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash When teachers and parents support each other, great things happen. I really appreciate it when parents ask me what they can...

#specialeducation #middleschool #motivation #languagearts #inclusion #executiveprocessing In Part 1 I discussed my inspiration and rationale for providing a ...

Student Workspace: In which I discuss an outside-the-box strategy for engaging a special education student. I’ve always been fascinated by the artistic proce...

As children grow and develop, they gradually become aware of their own thought processes. They grow beyond thinking to having thought awareness, or metacogni...

Reading is a form of receptive language. As such, most people approach reading as a one-way process. This is understandable, but unfortunate. Under normal ci...

I first learned about Bloom’s Taxonomy—a hierarchy of knowledge—back in graduate school and it opened my eyes as to the primary role of a classroom teacher: ...

Thematic analysis is difficult for young readers. Language arts teachers often make it a priority to guide students to an understanding of the big ideas with...

Let me begin by saying that I embrace technology in my sixth-grade language arts classroom, but there are times when tried-and-true methods, however archaic ...

In my last blog, I wrote about marking text with low-skilled readers to boost engagement. Marking text is formally known as annotating, which is the time-tes...

From a cognitive standpoint, the greatest disservice done to students was to compartmentalize disciplines. Yet the industrialized model of education—with sep...